I Know This Much Is True

by Wally Lamb

  She let go of my hand and put herself against me—reached up under my balls and stroked me there. Smiled. Watched me blink. Watched me swallow. Good sex with Dessa was something we’d taught each other, but Joy came into the thing we had already knowing what would drive me crazy. Same things that had driven her two husbands crazy, I guess. And her uncle.

  “What about what I expect?” she said. “Doesn’t that count for anything?” Her finger kept stroking. In another ten seconds, she’d get whatever she wanted.

  I took her hand by the wrist and held it away from me. Stared at her. Waited.

  “It’s not . . . ,” she said.

  “It’s not what?”

  “It’s not that I don’t like him. I do like him, Dominick. He’s a nice guy, in his own weird way. But he scares me. The way he acts sometimes. The way he looks at me.”

  It was crap, what she was implying: that Thomas was eyeballing her. Lusting after her. I mean, most guys do. Joy’s a very good-looking woman. She gets her share of ogling. But with all the medication he’s taken over the years, my brother has about as much sex drive as a mannequin. “How does he look at you?” I said. “Give me the specifics.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It isn’t even really that. He just kind of gives me the creeps.”

  “He gives everybody the creeps,” I said. I was still squeezing her wrist. Squeezing it a little harder, even.

  “Yeah, but . . . well, part of it—I’m just trying to be honest, okay, Dominick? Don’t get mad, but . . . part of it is that you and he look so much alike. That’s what’s a little scary. Sometimes he seems like some weird version of you.”

  I kept looking at her until she looked away. Then I let go of her hand and stepped into the shower.

  “Hey, just forget it, okay?” she called in, over the hiss of the water. “Go ahead. Bring him over. I’ll deal with it. It’s my problem, not yours. I’m sorry, Dominick. Okay?”

  Her hand reached past the plastic curtain and inside for my hand. I stood there and watched it move, searching, like the grope of a blind person. I refused to grab it, to take her small, perfect hand in some soggy gesture that gave her permission to feel that way—to say what she’d just said about him.

  I wouldn’t give her that. I couldn’t. Which is probably, right there, why it’s never going to work with her and me.

  I picked up Thomas same as usual that day. Drove him all the way up to the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass., which he didn’t give a crap about seeing. Took him out to eat at a Red Lobster on the way home, where he spilled melted butter all over himself. Got back purposely late. I gave Joy the silent treatment for the next couple of days—treated her so shabbily that I ended up rooting for her instead of me. She doesn’t have it easy living with me. I know that. You try being the brother of a paranoid schizophrenic. See if it doesn’t royally fuck up your life. Your relationships.

  I stood there staring at the blinking message machine. Remembered the other phone messages—the ones I hadn’t listened to yet. Hit the button.

  Beep. “Good afternoon, Mr. Birdsey. This is Henry Rood again. It’s five o’clock, sir—the end of the workday.” (He was slurring his words, had jumped the gun on cocktail hour again.) “Not that your workday ever began, Mr. Birdsey. At least not here it didn’t. I’m still waiting for you to return one of the five calls I’ve made to you now. I’m marking them down—all my attempts to communicate with you. I have a little pad here. Maybe I should just call the Better Business Bureau instead.”

  “Maybe you should just blow it out your ass,” I told the machine. I’d get to his freakin’ house when I got to it.

  Beep. “Uh, yeah, hello. My name is Lisa Sheffer. I’m trying to reach Dominick Birdsey? In regard to Thomas Birdsey? Your brother?”

  Here we go again, I thought. What illustrious organization are you with, honey? Hard Copy? Geraldo?

  “I’m a social worker at Hatch Forensic Institute and I’ve been assigned to him, or he’s been assigned to me, or whatever. . . . I know you were pretty upset tonight when you came in with him, and I just thought you might want to talk to me? Have me walk you through the procedures down here or whatever? You can give me a call if you want to. I’m going to be in my office until about ten o’clock tonight.” I looked up at the clock. Fuck! It was twenty after ten. “Or, you can call me tomorrow. Relax, now. Okay? Okay.”

  End of message. Shit! If I had just listened to the whole goddamned tape as soon as I got home. . . .

  But the voice spoke again.

  “I, um, I just talked to him. We just had a nice talk. He’s okay. He’s fine, under the circumstances. Really. I know you had a bad . . . sometimes some of the guards here can get a little . . . well, he’s okay. Your brother. Inside the unit, it’s not like, you know, a torture chamber or anything. It’s really a pretty humane place, for the most part. I just thought it might help if you knew that after what happened tonight. Okay? . . . They’ve got him on one-to-one observation in a room right across from the nurses’ station. Which is good, right? And the nurse who’s on tonight is super. I know her. . . . So, anyway, just relax. And like I said, call me if you want to. So, uh . . . well, no. That’s it, I guess. Bye.”

  I tried calling her back. Maybe she’d stayed later than she’d planned. But there was no answer.

  I went into the living room and stood there, channel-flipping. Lisa Sheffer: at least she sounded somewhat human. I paced. Went into the bathroom and popped another of Joy’s pills. The codeine was either working or it wasn’t working—I wasn’t sure. I was still sore down there below the belt, but it was like, who gives a shit? Which I guess meant that it was working. . . .

  I woke up from a dream where I was apologizing to Connie Chung for something. Begging her to forgive me. To give me the key so that I could unlock my brother. “La chiave,” she said. “Say it. La chiave.”

  When I opened my eyes, Joy was sitting on the couch next to me. “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi. . . . What’s up?”

  She ran her fingers through my hair. “He looks like a little boy when he first wakes up, doesn’t he?” she said. At first, I didn’t know who she was talking to, or if I was still dreaming or what. Then I saw him. The Duchess. He was sitting across the room on her overstuffed futon, smiling at me. They both had drinks in their hands. Cream drinks.

  “How are you?” Joy said.

  “I’m all right,” I said. “I’m good.”

  “Good,” she said. She put her hand to my face. Stroked my cheek with her shoplifter’s fingers. They were damp from her drink. Damp and cold.

  7

  Thomas and I meander along the edge of the pond, stopping whenever we see flat stones. Skimming stones. Thomas stoops. He’s found a good one. “Watch this,” he says, and lets it fly. The stone hops the water’s surface six, seven, eight . . .

  A sound distracts me—a chattering noise—a monkey! It’s high up on a branch in the big tree behind us, partly visible and partly hidden by the fluttering silver bottoms of leaves. “Dominick!” Thomas says. “Watch!” He hurls another stone. Eight, nine, ten, eleven. . . . I look back up in the tree. Now the monkey is an old woman. She sits, cackling, scrutinizing us. . . . Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep!

  “Yeah, wait a minute, wait a minute,” I grumbled at the clock radio. My hand flailed, found the button. Silence. Lying there, half-awake, half-asleep, I suddenly remembered the night before: Thomas in leg chains, the sound of his screaming as they led him into the locked ward. His being at Hatch dropped onto my back like an anvil.

  The bedroom was cold. Should have started the furnace by now. I reached down and grabbed the blanket, pulled it up to my neck.

  Was he already awake down there? Maybe he and I were waking up at the same exact second. We’d had that telepathy thing off and on our whole lives—had shared each other’s life in ways that only twins can. Answering each other’s questions, sometimes before the other one even asked. That time in seventh grade when I broke my
arm in gym class and Thomas felt the pain on the other side of the school. Or that summer Ray rented the cottage at Oxoboxo Lake—that game Thomas and I used to play where we’d psyche each other out: jump off the dock and see if we’d both thought of the same kind of dive to do. . . . The week before, even. I mean, hey, I didn’t know he was over at the library, lopping his hand off because of Kuwait, but I knew something was wrong. I’d been agitated all that morning—dropped a can of paint, something I never do. And when that cruiser was coming down Gillette Street, riding toward the Roods’ house, the first thing I thought was: Thomas.

  I heard the shower stop, the curtain swish open. The clock said 5:55. She does that all the time on her early days, the mornings when she teaches aerobics: gets up before the alarm and then forgets to shut the damn thing off. . . . When Joy and I were first going out, I used to go down there and take that class. The “A.M. Executive Stretch,” it’s called. She gives you a good workout—makes it worth the effort. It was the locker room afterwards I couldn’t take. All these suit-and-tie types hooking their socks back up to their garters and speculating about Joy’s cup size, about what kind of a workout she gave in bed. They didn’t know I was the boyfriend—didn’t know me from a hole in the wall. When I finally called one of them on it—this pencil-necked insurance honcho who was worse than the others—he complained to the manager about me. Joy said maybe it would be better if I didn’t come to that class. It’s part of the con down there, see? Guys are supposed to fantasize about the instructors. It’s good for business.

  I sat up in bed and swung my legs onto the floor. Oh, man, I was sore. There was no way I was going to paint today. I was probably going to have to take Ray up on his offer—have him give me a hand with Rood’s house, no matter what it cost me, sanity-wise. Now I wished I’d called Ray the night before to tell him about Thomas. About Hatch.

  I made a mental list: Call Ray. Call Rood. Call Thomas’s doctor. Call that social worker. What was her name? Lisa something. A real rookie from the sound of her message on the machine, but at least she was a starting point. I’d find out who her superior was and cut to the chase. Talk to the biggest mucky-muck I could find down there. I wanted to have some answers by the time I saw my brother. Wanted to be able to say to Thomas, okay, look, here’s the deal: we’re getting you out of here by such-and-such.

  The bathroom door opened, steam clouds chasing Joy out like an entourage. It’s no wonder the ceiling in there’s a mildew factory. “Leave the door open if you’re going to run the water so hot,” I tell her. She says she can’t because of that stupid movie Psycho.

  Psychos: that’s who they’d thrown my brother in with down there. A bunch of violent psychopaths. If Thomas had so much as a mark on him by the time I got him out of there, I’d sue their asses off. Make them pay in spades.

  Joy touched my shoulder when she walked by me. Took off her towel. I liked watching her get ready like this, first thing in the morning. Before the phone rang. Before either of us opened our mouths and blew it. She liked me watching her, too. The morning performance. The reverse striptease. Dessa was always kind of shy about getting dressed around me—used to always hustle into her clothes over near our closet. Joy’s the opposite.

  She squirted cream onto her hand and began rubbing her neck, her breasts, the insides of her legs. Joy’s pubic hair’s this neat, perfect triangle. Light brown, silky to the touch, not coarse like Dessa’s. She gets it bikini-waxed down at the health club. They have the world’s shittiest medical plan down there—no prescription rider, no dental plan—but you can get unlimited time in the tanning booths. Get your bush trimmed for free. I watched her shimmy into her leotard—the zebra stripe one with that black thong thing to make sure your eye travels down to the right place. Sore balls or not, I was starting to come to attention. I’m like a dog around Joy. She can just walk into the room. . . .

  That’s what they count on down at that club where she works: that guys are dogs. That everyone’s just their bodies. Joy’s taken these seminars in something called “client maximization,” which is corporate-talk for “screw the customer.” Take that zebra-striped leotard, for instance: they make the employees wear the same stuff they sell in that little overpriced boutique of theirs. Here’s the theory: some fat chick goes in there, coughs up forty or fifty bucks for one of those leotard-and-thong numbers, and comes out of the locker room thinking she looks like Joy. Client maximization: give me a break. You know who owns the Hardbodies chain? United Foods.

  “Hi,” Joy said.

  “Hi.”

  “How you feeling?”

  I shrugged. “I guess I’ll live.”

  I got up and hobbled toward the bathroom. That goddamned guard had me walking bowlegged.

  Jesus, it was like the rain forest in there—walls dripping, mirror and window fogged up. “Are you working today, Dominick?” she called in.

  “Can’t. I’ve gotta go down there and get this thing about my brother straightened out.” I started the shower, dropped out of my underwear. There was a maroon bruise on the inside of my thigh. My scrotum was swollen. Black and purple and blue.

  “No way in hell I’d be able to get up and down that scaffolding over on Gillette Street,” I called out to her.

  “Is Gillette Street Henry Rood’s house?” she said.

  “Yup. How’d you guess?”

  “He was so nasty yesterday when he called. I was like, excuse me, but I’m not painting your house. Don’t yell at me.”

  “You told him that?”

  “No. But I felt like it.”

  “Good,” I said. “Next time, do it. Give him hell.”

  The warm water soothed me. Maybe that’s what I should do: stay in the shower all day. Brother? What brother? . . . As I stood there, my dream came back to me—the one I’d woken up to. Me and him up at . . . Rosemark’s Pond, I guess it was. Monkeys and old ladies up in the trees? Shit, man, I didn’t even want to know what that meant. . . . He’d always been a good stone skimmer, my brother. He’d always been better at that than me.

  When I opened the shower curtain, Joy was standing in front of our vanity, putting on eye makeup. “Look at this,” I said, showing her my war wounds from the night before.

  “Oh, my God. . . . Hey, Dominick?”

  “What?”

  “I was just wondering. What about Connie Chung?”

  “What about her?”

  “What should I tell her when she calls back? About the interview? She needs to know one way or the other. I had to give her my work number in case she can’t get ahold of you.”

  “Tell her no,” I said. Joy stood there, not getting it.

  “Okay, fine,” she finally said. “It’s your decision. I just . . .”

  “You just what?”

  “Well, I just think maybe you should talk to her first. They’re doing this special? On people’s reactions to Operation Desert Shield?”

  “He had a reaction, all right,” I said. “His reaction got him locked up in a maximum-security prison. ‘Good evening, this is Connie Chung, coming to you live among the psychopaths.’ That ought to be great for the ratings.”

  “Just hear what she has to say before you decide. She was nice, Dominick. She sounded real sympathetic.”

  I shook my head. “Yeah, right.”

  “No, really. She was. Thad thought so, too.”

  “Thad? What the fuck does he have to do with it?”

  “Nothing. He was here when she called, that’s all. He answered the phone. When I got off, we were both like, ‘Oh, my God, we were just talking to Connie Chung from TV.’ “

  “Yeah, big whoop,” I said. “Look, from now on, I don’t want that jerk answering our phone.”

  She let that one go. She was still stuck on Connie Chung. “Really, Dominick. Just talk to her. She was real sweet.”

  “She was ‘real sweet’ because she wanted something from you. Believe me, Joy, Connie Chung’s not your new best friend.”

  She pivoted
around and glared at me. “I know she’s not my new best friend, okay?” she said. “I’m not stupid, whether you think I am or not.”

  “Look,” I said. “I just don’t want . . . I’ve just got one or two other things that I’m trying to deal with right now, and I don’t—”

  “You know what I wish sometimes?” she said. “I wish that you’d take care of me the way you take care of him. Because that would be a real nice surprise sometime, Dominick: being taken care of a little by my own boyfriend. But that’s never going to happen, is it? Because I’m not crazy.”

  Forgetting my injury, I flopped back down on the bed. Waited out the pain. “Don’t do this, Joy, okay?” I said. “Not right now. Just don’t. . . . First of all, I don’t think you’re stupid. I know this is hard for you. It’s hard for all of us. But it’s nonnegotiable—me looking out for him. Okay? It’s just something I have to do.”

  “Fine,” she said. “Do it then. Go for it, Dominick.” She walked out of the room.

  It was funny, in a way—funny-ironic: an interview with Connie Chung. A national audience. It was exactly what Thomas had been looking for. Exactly why he’d hacked off his hand in the first place. He thought he could stop a war from happening if he could just get everyone’s attention. Once people heard what he had to say, he’d told me, he would find his flock. His ministry. And he probably would, too, knowing how many lunatics there were out there. I could see it now: the Church of St. Thomas Birdsey. The Holy Order of Amputees for Peace. It would be “dangerous,” though, Thomas told me. Saving the entire world would really put him on Satan’s shit list.

  Joy came back into the bedroom. Started towel-drying her hair. “Hey, some store left a message on the machine for you,” I said. “The cocktail dress you ordered is in.”

  Her not saying anything made her seem guilty of something. I couldn’t see her face.

  “So what do you need a cocktail dress for?” I said.

  She shook out her hair, poked at it with her fingers. Joy’s got one of those au naturel hairdos. I watched her eyes in the mirror. No guilty expression. No expression at all. That deadpan of hers was probably the reason she’d been such a good shoplifter.