Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival (4 page)

“We’ve much work to do,” he said on the second morning after the tsunami, as he stood praying on the shore. “You have to come back.”

At night in his simple room on church grounds, he prayed for the people of Matera, but each morning he’d return to the beach.

It was on the third day after the tsunami that Father Charles says his prayers were answered. That morning, as he stood on the shore, he implored the statue to return.

“My goodness, you have to come today,” he said. “You can’t wait anymore.”

A few hours later a child came to the church and spoke with one of the deacons. He’d found something lying in bushes about a mile from the shrine. It was the statue, intact. Even the delicate gold crown on baby Jesus’s head had remained in place.

When Father Charles was summoned, he could barely contain himself, so sure was he that it was the work of God.

Nearly two weeks later, when I talk with him, we stand on the beach in the spot where he prayed each morning. His white cassock flutters in the breeze, and he clutches a black rosary in his hand. He is more convinced than ever that God has watched over Matera.

“Lives are lost, and we are still looking for so many people,” he says. “For the statue to come back, it’s a miracle. I think these people who’ve died have sacrificed for a better cause. Our country was divided politically and along ethnic lines, and now we don’t think about divisions. When I do the burials, when I visit the mortuaries, and I see all the bodies together, just the same, without any clothes, it shows whatever the faith, whatever the culture, the color, we are all human in the end.”

The statue of Our Lady of Matera was taken to the bishop’s office, where it will be stored until the church is repaired. The day the statue is returned, Father Charles and his parishioners intend to walk through the streets of Matera with it. A procession of survivors, showing Our Lady that their faith is still alive.

YOU ALWAYS HEAR
stories about brothers who sense each other’s pain. Brothers so close that when one is in danger, the other knows it, feels it. This isn’t one of those stories. The night my brother died, I was hundreds of miles away, in Washington, sitting on a subway. At the moment it happened, I didn’t feel a thing.

I’d only seen him once since April, when he’d appeared at my crew race scared and disoriented. We’d talked on the phone, but never for very long. The day I saw him, I was interning in Washington, but had come to New York for a long weekend. By chance I ran into him on the street. It was the day before the Fourth of July.

“The last time I saw you, I was like an animal,” he said. I wasn’t sure what he meant, and I didn’t know what to say, but I took it as a good sign that he was joking about our last encounter. We went for a hamburger, and parted soon after. I can’t remember if we hugged or not. He said he’d see me later that weekend. He didn’t. I never saw him alive again.

ON JULY 22, 1988,
my brother showed up at my mother’s apartment early in the morning, unexpectedly. It was a Friday, and once again he said that he wanted to move back in. He seemed out of sorts, nervous, and said he hadn’t slept the night before. Throughout the day, he took several naps in my old bedroom, on the second floor of the duplex. When she checked on him, my mother noticed he’d opened the sliding glass door to the balcony. It was a summer day, and the heat was overwhelming.

“Don’t you want me to turn on the air conditioner?” she asked him.

“No,” he said. “It’s fine the way it is.”

They ate lunch together, and talked. My mother was concerned, but not overly so. She knew that something was wrong, but Carter wouldn’t say what. After lunch she let him sleep for a time, then checked on him to see if there was anything he wanted. At some point, as he lay on the sofa in the library, she read him a story by Michael Cunningham called “White Angel,” which had just been published in
The New Yorker.
In the story, a young boy unexpectedly dies after he runs through a plate-glass sliding door in his parents’ living room while they are having a party. A shard of glass severs an artery in his neck. The violence of the story surprised my mom, but it didn’t seem to upset Carter.

“That was a good story,” he said.

He took another nap.

At about 7:00
P.M.
, he came into my mom’s room. He appeared dazed, disoriented.

“What’s going on? What’s going on?” he asked.

“Nothing’s going on,” my mother said soothingly.

“No, no,” he said shaking his head. He ran from her room, “as if he knew where he was going, knew the destination,” she would later tell me. My mother followed him as he ran up the curving staircase, into my room, through the sliding glass door, and onto the balcony.

By the time she got there, he was perched on the low stone wall that surrounded the terrace outside my room. His right foot was on top of the wall, his left foot was touching the terrace floor.

“What are you doing?” she cried out, and started moving toward him.

“No, no. Don’t come near me,” he said.

“Don’t do this to me, don’t do this to Anderson, don’t do this to Daddy,” my mother pleaded.

“Will I ever feel again?” he asked.

My mother is not sure how long they were out there on the terrace. It all happened very fast. He looked down at the ground, fourteen stories below. A helicopter passed overhead, a glint of silver in the late-summer sky. Then he moved.

“He was like a gymnast,” my mother remembers. “He went over the ledge and hung on the edge like it was a practice bar in a gym.”

“I shouted, ‘Carter, come back!’” she told me later, “just for a moment I thought he was going to. But he didn’t. He just let go.”

IN ANCIENT ROME,
priests called haruspices, charged with predicting the future, would push their hands deep into the innards of freshly killed animals. They removed the heart, the liver, the entrails, and splayed them out on an altar to divine the will of the Gods. I see no signs in Sri Lanka’s bloodied remains, no augury of what 2005 will hold. I’m searching for stories about what has already happened. I’ve missed the warnings about what lies ahead, the signs of what’s to come.

After two weeks in Sri Lanka, I return to New York. I thought I’d dream of that train wreck, of Sunera and Jinandari, Maduranga, Father Charles, and all the others whose gazes I held and hands I touched. I don’t. Instead, I dream of the ocean, and all those still trapped deep beneath. Their eyes open, their hair swaying with the tide. Thousands of people submerged in silence, preserved in the cold saltwater, entombed. Thousands of people. Together. Alone.

IT TOOK SEVERAL
hours for my mother to find me after my brother’s suicide. By the time I got her call, the last shuttle had already left Washington, so I rented a car at the airport and drove through the night.

I can’t remember what she said to me on the phone, the actual words she used. I just recall the shock in her voice. I could picture the stunned look in her eyes. I didn’t want to talk to anyone, didn’t want to be consoled. Since my father’s death, I’d wanted to control my life, control access to my emotions. When I heard that my brother was dead, I dove deeper into myself. I retreated, hoping to block the shock, the reeling fear, the wave of nausea that made me clutch my stomach.

I was sad, of course, but I was angry as well. How could he have done this to our mother, killed himself in front of her? How could he have left me behind to deal with the mess?

It was dawn when I reached New York. On the FDR Drive I searched the skyline for my mother’s apartment building. Out of habit I counted, seeing how long it would take me to find my balcony. Five seconds. When I spotted it I realized that it was the ledge my brother had jumped from. I wondered if someone driving on this road had seen him do it. He would have appeared as just a small speck hurtling through the air, disappearing into the sidewalk below.

In the four days between my brother’s death and his funeral, it seemed as if we were marooned on an ice floe broken off from a glacier. We didn’t leave the apartment. A giant chasm had opened up around us, and we were suddenly separate from the rest of the world.

My mother lay in bed retelling the story of Carter’s death to each person who came to visit her, as if by repeating it she’d discover some new piece of information that would explain it all, would perhaps reveal that it hadn’t really happened, that it was all a misunderstanding, a terrible dream.

“Like a gymnast,” she’d say to each new visitor. I knew it helped her to go over and over it, combing the sand for some clue, some shard that would bring Carter back. No matter how many times I heard the story, however, it still didn’t make any sense.

After a while I stopped listening. The story didn’t get me any closer to understanding. If anything, it pointed out what wasn’t known, and what might never be. “Why?” That’s the question everyone asked: Why kill himself? Why do it in front of his mother? Why didn’t he leave a note?

Sometimes my mother wept, and screamed. I think I envied her that. I cried, but at night, in my pillow, not wanting others to hear. I suppose I worried that if I let go, I, too, would fall off the edge, plunge into whatever blackness had swept my brother away.

A handful of reporters and cameramen waited outside the building. It didn’t occur to me that this had become a media event until my mother’s lawyer accidentally left a copy of the
New York Post
in the apartment.
HEIR’S TRAGIC LAST HOURS
was the headline on the front page. They kept referring to my mother as the “Poor Little Rich Girl,” a tag that tabloids had given her as a child at the height of her mother and aunt’s custody battle. I threw the paper out. I didn’t want my mother to see that she was once again in the headlines.

When we arrived at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel for Carter’s wake, about a half-dozen photographers snapped pictures as I helped my mom out of the car. I hated them: circling like vultures over our barely breathing bodies.

I’d forgotten that moment, that feeling, until this past year, when I found myself reporting outside Terri Schiavo’s hospice watching a jostling crowd of cameramen follow her father’s and mother’s every move. Schiavo was in a persistent vegetative state, and her feeding tube had been removed. Her parents were fighting to have it put back in.

“Khraw, khraw,”
a producer standing next to me screeched, mimicking the sound of circling buzzards.

“I’ve become what I once hated,” I thought to myself—sadly, not for the first time.

Carter’s casket was in the largest room the funeral home had, but the line of mourners stretched down the block. My mom stood receiving people, one by one looking into their eyes for answers.

There had been no invitations issued, so it wasn’t possible to control who got on the line. I ended up screening those gathered, pulling some close friends off the queue and telling them just to come in. Occasionally I’d approach a stranger, trying to find out who he or she was. Several were merely curious passersby. One man was holding a copy of the
New York Post
and wanted my mom to autograph it. I thanked him for coming and asked someone to show him out.

My brother was wearing a gray Paul Stuart suit. I’d gone to his apartment the day before the wake to pick it out. When I’d seen the suit in his closet, I’d wanted it for myself, then felt guilty for being selfish, so I decided that that was the suit he should be buried in. In the taxi on my way home, I sat with it on my lap. The radio was on, and an interviewer was saying to a caller, “Hey, I mean look at that Vanderbilt kid. I mean the interest on his trust fund was probably more than I’ll make in my lifetime, and that didn’t stop him from jumping off a building. I mean, am I right or what?”

The morticians had parted my brother’s hair on the wrong side. “Oh, no, that’s not him,” I almost said. “There’s been some kind of mistake.”

I noticed a silver screw with a bolt sticking out of the back of his head. I hoped my mom couldn’t see it. If she did, she showed no sign. Before we left, we stood together by the casket. My mother looked at my brother’s face, and closed her eyes for a moment. Then, just as she had with my father, she asked for a pair of scissors, and cut off a lock of Carter’s hair.

MY FINAL YEAR
of college was a blur. I spent most of my time trying to understand what had happened, worried that whatever dark impulse had driven my brother to his death might still be lurking somewhere out there, waiting for me.

Many times that year, I wished I had a mark, a scar, a missing limb, something children could have pointed at, at which adults could tell them not to stare. At least then they would have seen, would have known. I wouldn’t have been expected to smile and mingle, meet and greet. Everyone could have seen that, like a broken locket, I had only half a heart.

Senior year became a series of holidays and celebrations to avoid. My mother and I ordered Chinese takeout on Thanksgiving, watched movies on Christmas. We stopped giving gifts, ignored each other’s birthdays. Each event was a reminder of what we’d lost. On weekends I’d take the train back to New York. We’d eat dinner at home, mostly stay indoors. For the first few months, I slept in the guest room downstairs, unable to set foot in my own room or look at the balcony outside it. My mother talked about Carter, went over theories in her head. I listened but couldn’t add much. It was like staring into a bottomless chasm. I worried that there was nothing to stop me from falling if I took the next step. I was there, I listened, we were together. It was all I was capable of.

I graduated college nearly a year after my brother died. My mom came up to New Haven, we took some pictures, and that was it. She returned to New York to pack up the apartment and move to a townhouse on the other side of the city. She no longer wanted to live in a penthouse. After my brother’s death, both of us developed a fear of heights. I asked her what she thought I should do for work, now that I’d graduated.

“Follow your bliss,” she said, quoting Joseph Campbell. I was hoping for something more specific—“Plastics,” for instance. I worried I couldn’t “follow my bliss” because I couldn’t feel my bliss; I couldn’t feel anything at all. I wanted to be someplace where emotions were palpable, where the pain outside matched the pain I was feeling inside. I needed balance, equilibrium, or as close to it as I could get. I also wanted to survive, and I thought I could learn from others who had. War seemed like my only option.