Security Detail

If writing a memoir is like surgery without anesthesia, revising a memoir is like watching a video recording of the surgery: those are my guts? but there’s so much blood! how did the scar ever heal?

I’ve spent the past week rewinding and pausing the video, looking for moments that illustrate how the death of my brother shaped my teenage self and later, my widowed self.

In the distillation process, several moments emerged.

This is one of them.

* * *

It’s two days before Father’s Day and I’m behind the 8-ball.

I usually have the gift sorted two weeks in advance, but this year?

I’ve clearly lost my edge.

Even the first Father’s Day after Phil died, I still had my edge.

I planned everything—gave Dad a homemade card, a book on CD, several framed photos and drove my parents to brunch after church—but the whole day just felt like a fake pep rally.

We ended up at the cemetery and drove home in silence.

That evening, while I smoked a cigarette on my second-story windowsill, I noticed two well-dressed guys walking across our lawn with burgeoning shopping bags.

Weird.

When they disappeared from view, I tossed my smoke and crept into Phil’s dark bedroom. I peered down from his window and saw the men set their bags down in front of our garage.

When they start lifting the corner of the garage door, I punch the window open with a fury.

What da fuck? I say.

The voice that comes out of me is foreign.

It’s a voice that doesn’t know it belongs to a 5-foot-4 white girl.

The men look up, frozen.

I do not blink.

Yeah, I say, thrusting my chest out like I’d seen Phil do. The fuck.

They drop the garage door, grab their bags and take off.

So do I.

I bolt downstairs, past my parents watching TV.

Call the cops! I yell, running toward the front door. We almost just got robbed!

I’m sprinting at top speed when I see them throw their loot over the perimeter wall and scale it. I hear an engine start but by the time I hop the wall, I can only get a make and model—early 90s BMW, 700 series, dark paint—but not the plate number.

My adrenaline’s still pumping when Dad runs up with the portable phone.

They’re already gone, I say. You got the cops?

He nods.

Good. I got a description.

Evening, officer, I say, and launch into details.

After a few minutes, he says they have everything they need.

We’ll be in touch if we need you to do an I.D.

I’m game, I say. I mean, what kind of asshats go thieving in a luxury car?

The cop laughs.

The kind that steal luxury cars to go thieving, he answers.

Touché, I say, before hanging up.

I give the phone to my dad, who puts his arm around me.

Who needs a guard dog when we have you? he smiles.

I kinda felt like Phil tonight, I confess. Six feet tall. Gangster.

He’d be proud of you, Dad says.

Father’s Day 1995 was not the last time I channeled my brother.

Over the next decade, I would do things Phil had done and things he didn’t live long enough to do.

I drove too fast on highways, jumped out of planes, took up rock-climbing and ate mushrooms, traipsed around Europe and continued standing up to men twice my size.

His death gave me a strong sense of everyone else’s mortality, yet it made me feel invincible.

No way anything could happen to me.

My parents couldn’t take it.

God must have agreed.

And added some extra muscle to my security detail.