I Know This Much Is True

by Wally Lamb

  “I know I don’t,” I said. “I have to go, too, okay? You mind?”

  He complicated things, of course: locked himself in a stall for about ten minutes. Made me stand there, a nervous wreck, calling to him every thirty seconds or so. “You all right? . . . You still alive in there?” Guys kept going in and out, sneaking looks. I felt just like I’d felt on that school field trip when he’d locked himself in the bus toilet. Felt what I’d felt that first year in college, in our dorm: Thomas and Dominick, the Birdsey weirdos.

  “Jesus, I thought maybe you fell in or something,” Leo said. He’d picked out a booth by the front window, but Thomas balked. Said he’d be a sitting duck in that spot.

  “Stop it,” I told him. “Just sit down. No one’s after you.” He scoffed at that.

  Leo started getting up, gathering our stuff together. “Sit down,” I said. “This seat’s fine. He’s got to—”

  “What’s the big deal?” Leo said. “There’s a glare here anyway. Come on.”

  When we were repositioned over by the restrooms, Thomas told Leo that he’d worked at this McDonald’s once.

  “Not this one,” I said. “You worked at the other one—the one on Crescent Street.”

  “No, I didn’t,” he said.

  “Yes, you did.” You freaked out there, remember? You trashed the drive-thru speaker because aliens were calling to you. Remember?

  “No, I didn’t,” he insisted. “I worked at this one.”

  “All right, fine,” I said. “It was this one. I’m screwed up.”

  Halfway through his meal, Thomas decided he had to go to the bathroom again. This time, I let him go himself.

  “Listen,” I told Leo. “I know you meant well, but he’s got to be trained how to function normally in public. Someone who’s forty-one years old shouldn’t be getting a kiddie meal. Shouldn’t be allowed to play Hide-in-the-Back-of-the-Restaurant-Because-They’re-Out-to-Get-Me.”

  Leo filled his mouth with fries. “Hey, you know what my daughter said to me the other day, Dominick?” he said. “ ‘Take a chill pill, Dad.’ And now let me pass on those words of wisdom to you, okay? Re-lax. Take a chill pill, man. He’s doing fine.”

  “Yeah, right,” I said. I reached inside Thomas’s Happy Meal and pulled out his complimentary Little Mermaid figurine. Waved it in Leo’s face like evidence.

  Thomas and I were sitting in my living room watching The People’s Court when Sheffer called. “Okay, I got him a placement,” she said. “It’s a little complicated, though. Middletown can take him, but they don’t have a bed until Friday.”

  “All right,” I said. “He can stay here until Friday.”

  Sheffer said she had a better idea. She’d called down at Hope House, one of Thomas’s old group homes. They’d agreed to bend the rules a little—take him for the interim. “They’re short-staffed, but I really feel it’s better than having him stay with you.”

  “Why?”

  “What are you going to do, Dominick—strap him into his bed? Stay up all night like a sentry?”

  You go downstairs now, Dominick. This wouldn’t be any fun for you. Run up and tell us if Ray is coming. . . .

  All right, I said. I didn’t really have a problem with him going to Hope House for a couple of days. For one thing, it was close. For another, he’d liked it down there once upon a time—had done better at that place than anywhere else.

  I was already feeling a little over my head, I admitted to myself after I got off the phone. That stupid trip to McDonald’s had done a number on me. And if he was over at the group home, it’d give me time to get him some of the things he’d need for Middletown: new jeans, underwear, shampoo and shit. Maybe I’d get him some sneakers so’s he didn’t have to keep clomping around in those stupid wingtip shoes.

  I made us some supper and then drove him over there. Checked him in. The nighttime superviser cataloged aloud the personal belongings Thomas had wanted to bring: “Shoes, Bible, religious book, other religious book . . .” Oblivious of the admission process, Thomas sat there thumbing through his old favorite: Lives of the Martyred Saints.

  I left him watching TV in the rec room, slumped in a stuffed chair. On the wall above his head, a cloth banner proclaimed Hope Springs Eternal at HOPE HOUSE!

  “See you tomorrow,” I said. Bent down and kissed the top of his head, for some reason. I went home, got about halfway through a beer, and started dozing. Slept the sleep of the dead. . . .

  The telephone startled me awake.

  Missing? . . . What did she mean, missing?

  He had to have left the premises somewhere after 2:00 A.M., the woman said, which was when they’d done their last bed check. The police were on their way.

  Ray was already awake when I called. I swung by the house and picked him up on my way down there. The director kept throwing her hands into the air, insisting that this was the kind of thing that resulted from underfunding. Before all the cutbacks, she said, things like this just plain didn’t happen.

  Jerry Martineau was one of the cops who showed up. Ray and I gave them a list of the places where Thomas might have gone—places where he’d hidden in the past when his paranoia closed in. Martineau said he was optimistic. He’d only been missing for a couple of hours at most. In another fifteen, twenty minutes, the sun would be up in earnest—they’d be getting a nice, early start. They could probably get reinforcements by mid-morning, if necessary. He’d call in some off-duty guys if he had to. They’d find him for us.

  I nodded back at Martineau—let him spoon-feed me a little optimism. But I knew Thomas was dead. Had felt his dead weight since I’d swung my legs out of bed after that phone call. It was like I was dragging around some dead part of myself.

  Ray and I drove out to the Falls, parked at the Indian graveyard, and tramped up the path. It was my idea.

  “Thomas? . . . Hey, Thomas! “ Over and over, we called his name into the thundering water, the fog that hovered over the river below.

  Ray said something I couldn’t hear.

  “What?”

  “I said, let’s hike down there. Walk the bank. We can walk down as far as the footbridge, then cross over. Walk the other side back again.”

  I shook my head. Realized I didn’t want to be the one to find him.

  We walked back down the path, got back into the Escort. I was fishing through my pockets, trying to find my keys, when Ray started up.

  “I know I rode him too hard when he was a kid,” Ray said. “I know I did.” His eyes were panicky, pleading. “But she namby-pambied him all the time; I was just trying to toughen him for the world.” He threw open the door and got out again. Circled around and around the car. “Jesus,” he kept mumbling. “Jesus.”

  They found his shoes and socks first—on the bank a couple hundred yards or so past the waterspill. Then, a little before noon, two guys from the rescue squad found his body, in waist-deep water, caught up in the branches of a fallen tree. He’d floated about half a mile or so down, they figured. The rocks had banged him up pretty bad; there were scratches all over his face from that tree. Ray told me. He was the one who went down and identified the body. The water was rushing around and over him, someone told him; the current was still pretty wild from all that rain. Later, the coroner’s report would estimate the time of drowning at somewhere around 4:00 A.M.—right about the time my phone had rung. “Accidental,” he’d ruled, in spite of the shoes and socks. Whether Thomas had jumped or fallen in, none of us could really say.

  It was nighttime by the time all the necessary paperwork had been gotten through. Ray and I sat at the kitchen table over on Hollyhock Avenue and drank from the same bottle of Scotch we’d cracked open the night Ma died, four years earlier. We were both pretty quiet at first, both exhausted. But the second round gave us our tongues.

  “They tried to tell me to take it slow,” I said. “His social worker, the doctors. They said he’d feel unprotected after six months down there. But I knew better than any of them,
of course. I was the big expert. . . . You know what it is? I’m arrogant. That’s my problem. If I wasn’t so goddamned arrogant, he’d probably be alive right now. He’d be okay.”

  Ray reminded me that Thomas hadn’t been okay since he was nineteen years old.

  “Yeah?” I said. “Well, that doesn’t make me feel any less like shit.”

  Ray said he wished to hell he had gone down and seen him at Hatch—had made the effort. But after that stunt he’d pulled over at the library—Jesus Christ, cut off his own hand—well, that had been the last straw for him. “I’d had it,” he said. “But not you. You fought that kid’s battles his whole life.” Ray’s big, rough hand—hardened by work, by war—reached across the table. Hovered above my shoulder for a second or two and then clamped on. Squeezed. As if we were father and son after all. As if, now that Thomas was dead, I could forget the way Ray had treated him. . . .

  I stood up from the table, reeling a little from the Scotch. From my stepfather’s alien touch. “I’m cocked,” I said.

  “Stay here tonight, then,” he said. “Bunk up in your old room.”

  If I’d been sober, I would have refused. Would have gone home instead of up those stairs and down the hall to the left—to the Dominick and Thomas Museum.

  I flopped face down on the bottom bunk—Thomas’s bed. Ray came in with a set of sheets. “Just put ’em on the bureau,” I said. “I’ll get ’em in a few minutes.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Get some sleep. It’s over now.”

  The hell it is, I thought. Numb as I was from Scotch and loss and exhaustion, I knew that was a crock of shit.

  Somewhere in the middle of that night, I dreamt I was Thomas—that it was Dominick who had drowned, not me. I heard a lock tumble, a metallic squeak. The door of my prison cell gaped open. “Oh, hi, Ma,” I said. “Guess what? Dominick died.”

  I awoke in the morning on the top bunk—my bunk. The sheets were still on the bureau where Ray had left them. I had no recollection of having climbed up there. The bedroom was flooded with light. I lay still, staring up at the ceiling—at the brown water stain over by the window that had been there since we were kids.

  And as I lay there, a memory came back—the earliest memory I’ve ever had. I was four again. It was so vivid, so real. . . .

  I’m supposed to be lying down, taking my afternoon nap because I’m a big boy. I’m all by myself. No Thomas. Before my Thomas got sick, we took our naps together on the big bed in the spare room. Ma would lie between us, telling us stories about two best friends, a little bunny rabbit named Thomas and a little monkey named Dominick, who always gets into things.

  Now Ma’s too busy to tell stories. She has to take Thomas’s temperature and bring him medicine and ginger ale. She gave me some books and told me to look at the pictures until I felt sleepy. I know the letters in the books: m is for Ma, t is for Thomas. I hate the pages where I scribbled on the pictures. Ma asked me who did it and I told her Thomas did. Thomas is a bad, bad, bad, bad boy.

  My Thomas has to live in the spare room now. I can draw pictures for him, but I can’t have them back. I can call to him through the door, but he can’t answer me because his throat hurts and because he needs rest. Yesterday he answered me in a tiny, tiny voice. Did he shrink? Is he a little tiny Thomas now? “What does Thomas look like?” I asked Ma. She says he looks the same, except he has red dots on his neck and on the tips of his elbows and something the doctor called a strawberry tongue.

  I like strawberry Jell-O better than green Jell-O. When I lick the top, Ma says, “Don’t do that! Only bad boys do that.” One day yesterday I stuck my tongue out in the mirror. No strawberries.

  And I am MAD at my Thomas. I had to get a shot and it hurt. I wanted Ma to take me to get my shot, but Ray took me. He told me the needle wouldn’t hurt but it did hurt. When I cried, Ray squeezed my arm and said, “What’s the matter with you? Are you a tough guy or a sissy?” When Thomas and I both cry, Ray says, “Wah, wah, wah, it’s the little sissy girls.” That makes us cry more.

  Ma says last night Thomas got the shakes so bad that his teeth chattered. “Show me!” I said and she made her teeth go click click click. Thomas gets to drink all the ginger ale he wants AND there’s a bowl of Jell-O downstairs in the refrigerator that’s only for him, not me. When I go downstairs, I’m going to lick it. My Thomas is a bad, bad boy.

  When you’re big, you don’t have to take naps. You can stay up late and watch the Friday night fights and drink highballs. When I’m big, I’m going to fill up the whole bathtub with ginger ale and jump in and drink it and not even get sick.

  When Ma was a little girl, she got scarlet fever like Thomas. She had to stay in bed all day long and bang a pot on the wall for Mrs. Tusia next door if she needed help because her father was sleeping. . . . Little boys and girls used to die from scarlet fever, Ma says. Or they got better but grew weak hearts.

  I’m not supposed to get off this bed until after my nap. If I get up, Ma is going to tell Ray. Naps make me mad. They’re dumb. I’m rolling and rolling up in my bedspread. I’m a hot dog and my blanket is a hot dog bun. . . . Now I stand up and my bed’s a GIANT TRAMPOLINE! I jump! And jump! All the way up to Heaven where Mrs. Tusia lives. . . . She died. She was old. Some men came and carried her down the steps and drove her away. But I won’t let those men take my Thomas. I’ll shoot them. Pow! Pow! Pow! Ma says Thomas can come out of the spare room in one week, but I don’t know when that is. I think maybe he’s dead. The man on Ma’s opera records is dead and he can sing. “Ladies and gentlemen, Enrico Caruso!” They used to be Papa’s records. Papa is in Heaven, too.

  Why can’t I see Thomas? Why can’t I touch the drawings he’s touched? This nap is making me hot. And thirsty, too. I’m thirsty for some ice cold Canada Dry ginger ale.

  “Ma! . . . Ma-aa?”

  “What?”

  “Can I get up now?”

  “After your nap. Now go to sleep!”

  The brown stain on the ceiling turns into that monster. It’s going to come alive and fly down the hallway and bang the door down and eat my brother. Unless I shoot it.

  My bedroom rug is a giant lake. The flowers in it are stones. They lead to the edge. . . . I can make it. I do make it.

  I’m at the doorway. Sometimes Ma says she’s going to tell Ray when I’m bad and then she doesn’t tell him. The hallway is a boiling river. You can’t swim in it. You have to fly over it in your airplane, the Song Bird. “Hang on, Thomas. I will save you!” I’m Sky King. This isn’t my hand; it’s my radio.

  I fly the Song Bird over the boiling river to Thomas’s door. Stare at it. Listen.

  I put my fingers on the big diamond doorknob. It twists, clicks open. I enter the room. . . .

  It’s dark in here. The shades are pulled down. It smells bad. The fan from Ma and Ray’s room is in the window, blowing a breeze. I walk over to the bed. Stare at my Thomas. I say his name over the whirr of the fan. “Thomas? Thomas Birdsey! . . . THOMAS JOSEPH BIRDSEY!”

  Thomas’s mouth is closed. I want to see his strawberry tongue. Is he asleep or dead? . . .

  He sighs.

  I move closer. His shirt is off. I see the bones beneath his skin. His hands are raised above his head, palms out, as if some cowboy had said, “Stick ’em up!” and then shot him anyway.

  Chattering teeth, a strawberry tongue. . . . Suddenly, I know something I never knew before. Thomas and I are not one person. There are two of us.

  I move closer, bend down to his ear, and whisper my name.

  He twitches. Swats at the sound.

  “Dominick!”

  We are different people.

  Thomas is sick and I am not.

  He’s asleep. I’m awake.

  I can save myself.

  41

  13 August 1949

  My wife and I never discussed what the dottore had said—that another birth could stop her heart. Ignazia moved her clothes downstairs into Prosperine’s bedroom and I made no move to
claim that which rightfully belongs to a husband.

  After the night of Prosperine’s story, I refused to eat the food cooked in my own home. I had a little meeting with Signora Siragusa, my former landlady. She agreed to make my meals for four dollars a week and an extra fifty cents to still that wagging tongue in her mouth. Each evening on the way to work, I walked past the signora’s and picked up my dinner pail. Each morning, at the end of my shift, I stopped there again to leave the pail and eat my breakfast in the signora’s kitchen. The third meal I skipped or bought downtown—’Mericana food with no taste, everything drowning in that yellow glue they call gravy. Bread that tasted more like cotton than bread.

  Ignazia was insulted that I would not eat what she cooked. This she told me with her frowns and banging pot lids and her sighs sent up to Heaven—never with her words. We shared no words, either, about all that Prosperine had told, though I was sure those two whispered plenty about it behind my back. If I had been their fool before that night, I was their fool no longer. The Monkey’s drunken confessione had made me dangerous to them both.

  If I had been ‘Mericano, I might have run squealing to the police and repeated what Prosperine had revealed. Maybe the law would have taken that crazy monkey out of my house and sent her back across the ocean. But a Sicilian knows to keep his eyes open and his mouth shut. I wanted no more scandal brought down on the name of Tempesta—no fingers pointing at my casa di due appartamenti as the place where murdering women had gone to hide. Sometimes I told myself Ignazia was not Violetta D’Annunzio, that hellcat who had fouled herself with men and tricked a husband into swallowing glass. Maybe Violetta had paid the price for her sins and been put in the ground in Palermo, as Prosperine had said. But this I could only make myself believe for an hour or an afternoon and then, again, I would know the terrible truth.

  In the first weeks of her life, Ignazia’s harelipped baby suffered from colica and cried during night and day. Ignazia cried, too, and was plagued with female problems. Tusia’s wife told my wife all problems would go away—that mother and child would be at peace—once the girl was baptized.