But he must have felt the need to unload on someone, someone who wouldn’t feel they had to step in and actually help him with his situation. Len had been a sympathetic ear for my father, although there was nothing about his attitude that suggested sympathy to me. He was a simpleminded, judgmental asshole, as far as I could tell.
I wanted to ask Thomas about this, but was my brother a reliable witness to his own actions?
Driving away from the Prentice house, I felt myself getting swallowed into some kind of vortex. I’d come to Promise Falls from Burlington to deal with my father’s estate, set my brother up someplace, and get rid of the house, and really hadn’t made a dent in any of it. I kept finding myself sidetracked. Strange and unsettling words on Dad’s laptop. Thomas’s preoccupation with that goddamn face in the window. An unfortunate encounter between Thomas and Len Prentice, and apparently another, between Thomas and our father.
There was this other thing niggling away at my brain. The lawn tractor. The key in the OFF position. The blade housing raised, which indicated Dad had stopped mowing the lawn. But the job wasn’t finished, so why had he raised the blades?
It made me wonder whether he’d been interrupted. Was it possible someone had come down the side of the hill to talk to him? It was almost impossible to carry on a conversation with the tractor running, so Dad would have turned off the ignition. And if he thought this interruption was going to be an extended one, he’d have brought up the blades.
Was that what happened? Had someone stopped to chat? It wasn’t the best place for a conversation. It was a precarious spot, given how steep the slope was. Dad, sitting on the tractor, would have had to continually lean into the hill to keep the machine from tipping. Sitting straight up in the seat might have been all the leverage that was needed to topple the damn thing.
Which, in the end, was what happened.
But if the tractor rolled, and killed him, when it was already stopped, and if the reason Dad had come to a stop was because someone had wanted to talk to him, then who the hell was that person, and why hadn’t they called for help right away?
Thomas had been the one who finally dialed 911. After he’d found Dad, already dead, pinned by the machine.
Unless…
Unless Thomas was the one Dad had stopped for. To have that conversation. If it had turned into a heated argument, a simple shove would have been all Dad needed to go tumbling, taking the machine with him.
No.
That was unthinkable. My thoughts were running wild again, even worse than when I’d found “child prostitution” in the search field of Dad’s laptop. My mind was going places it had no business going.
It was stress, I told myself. The stress of losing my father, of having to take responsibility for Thomas—it was taking a toll.
I hadn’t even taken time to grieve. When had I had a chance? From the moment I’d arrived at my father’s house, I’d been thrown right into it. Making funeral arrangements, meeting with Harry Peyton, looking after Thomas, taking him to see Laura Grigorin.
Only now was I realizing how adrift I felt without Dad, without his guidance and steady hand.
“I miss you,” I found myself saying aloud, my hands gripped on the steering wheel. “I need you.”
I steered the car over to the shoulder, stopped, put it in park, and rested my forehead on the top of the steering wheel for a moment.
I hadn’t cried once since getting the phone call from the Promise Falls police about my father’s death. Now it was taking everything I had to keep the lid on. Maybe I was more like my father than I’d realized. I kept things bottled up, didn’t share my problems with others.
I loved my father. And I felt lost without him here beside me.
I got out my phone. A few seconds later, someone said, “Standard. Julie McGill here.”
“Why don’t you come out to the house for dinner tonight?”
“Is this George Clooney?”
“Yes.”
“Sure.”
WHEN I walked into the kitchen I saw a tuna sandwich sitting on a plate on my side of the table. There was a napkin folded at the side, and an opened bottle of beer that was now warm to the touch.
“Son of a bitch,” I said to myself. “He made my lunch.” I knew I’d asked him to, but I guess my expectations had been low. I felt bad.
I knocked on Thomas’s door and stepped in.
“Thanks for making me a sandwich,” I said.
“No problem,” he said, his back to me.
“Where are you?” I asked.
“London,” he said.
“How is it?”
“Old,” Thomas said.
“Did you eat? I hope you weren’t waiting for me.”
“I ate. And I put my plate and my glass and the bowl I mixed up the tuna and mayonnaise in into the dishwasher.”
“Thanks, man. We’re going to have a guest for dinner.”
“Who?”
“Julie.”
“Okay.”
I sat on the edge of the bed, which put me at a ninety-degree angle to him as he stared at the screen.
Thomas said, “Let’s say you come out of the Opera House on Bow Street in Covent Garden and you want to get to Trafalgar Square. Do you turn right and walk down to the Strand, or left and go up to—”
“Thomas, stop. I need to talk to you.”
“Just tell me which way you think.”
“Left.”
“Wrong. The faster way would be to go right, down to the Strand, then right and keep on going.” He turned and looked at me. “You can’t miss it.”
“Can you stop for a second?”
Thomas nodded.
“I want to ask you a few things. Things about Dad.”
“What?”
“Okay, first, the day Dad died, did you go out and talk to him when he was cutting grass on the side of the hill?”
Thomas cocked his head to one side. “I was going to. I was looking for him.”
“You didn’t go out, even to give him a phone message or anything? Something that made him turn off the machine and lift up the blades?”
“No,” he said again. “The only time I went out was to find him because I was hungry.”
“And he was trapped under the tractor.”
He nodded.
“The two of you, you got along pretty well most of the time, didn’t you?”
“Sometimes he got angry with me,” Thomas said. “You’ve asked me about this before.”
“Did you—I don’t know how to ask this without it sounding like I’m accusing you of something.”
Thomas showed no concern. “What is it?”
“Did you try to push Dad down the stairs?”
“Did Dad tell you about that?”
Would it be better if he thought our father had told me, or to admit I’d learned this from Len Prentice?
I sidestepped. “Is it true?”
Thomas nodded. “Yes. Sort of.”
“What happened? When was this?”
“About a month ago.”
“Tell me about it.”
“He wanted to talk about something that happened a long time ago,” Thomas said, glancing back at the London street scene on his monitor.
“What? Something that happened to Dad?”
“No. Something that happened to me.”
“To you? What happened to you?”
“I’m not supposed to talk about it. Dad told me not to.” He paused. “At the time. He told me I wasn’t ever to talk about it or he’d get really angry with me.”
“Jesus, Thomas, what are you talking about here? When was this?”
“When I was thirteen.”
“Dad did something to you when you were thirteen that he told you never to talk about?”
My brother hesitated. “Not…no, not exactly.”
“Thomas, look, whatever happened, it was a long time ago, and Dad’s gone. If there’s something you need to tell me, then you can do it.”
“There’s nothing I want to tell you. President Clinton says I’m not supposed to talk about this stuff. It makes me look weak. And I’m just on my way to Trafalgar Square.”
“Okay, but, Thomas, can we just go back to the thing that happened a month ago. What was that about?”
“Dad wanted to talk about the thing that happened when I was thirteen.”
“Had you ever talked about it all these years?”
Thomas shook his head. “No.”
“But out of the blue, Dad wanted to talk about it again?” I was grasping here, trying to figure out what the hell Thomas was talking about, what this thing was that had happened twenty-two years ago.
“Yes.”
“Why?’
“He said maybe he was wrong, maybe he’d done a bad thing, and that he was sorry about it. Dad was following me up the stairs, saying he wanted to talk to me about it, but I didn’t want to talk about it. I’d tried really, really hard not to think about it for all those years and so I stopped and turned around and said I didn’t want to talk about it and that if he didn’t want to listen to me when I was thirteen why did he want to listen to me now and I put my hand out to stop him from following me and I didn’t push hard but he tripped on the stair and he fell a little bit.”
“Fell a little bit?”
Thomas nodded.
“Could you explain that?”
“We were on the fourth step going up, so he didn’t fall very far. He landed flat on his back.”
“Jesus, Thomas. What did you do?”
“I said I was sorry, and I helped him get into the chair and I got him one of his ice packs. I was sad that he fell.”
“Did he go to the hospital? Or the doctor?”
“No. He took some extra-strength Advils.”
“He must have been furious with you.”
Thomas shook his head in the negative. “No. He said it was okay. He said he understood. He said I was entitled to be mad, and if I didn’t forgive him, he’d live with that. And the pills started to work, and he started to feel better, but it hurt for about a week.”
Len must have noticed my father was in pain and asked what he’d done to himself. Maybe Dad had related what happened, but not made a big deal about it. Len had said Dad made excuses for Thomas, which seemed to match the version of the tale my brother was telling me.
But what was Dad sorry about? And why didn’t Thomas want to talk about it? What did my dad think he wouldn’t want to forgive him for?
I said, “There’s something, some incident, Dr. Grigorin said you won’t talk about. Is it this? This thing Dad was apologizing for?”
Thomas nodded without hesitation.
“You need to tell me,” I implored. “I need to know.”
“No you don’t. It doesn’t matter. He’s not going to hurt me again.”
“Dad? Dad can’t hurt you anymore?”
Thomas shook his head. I didn’t know whether he was saying no, or dismissing me. “Dad would have believed me if you’d looked up at the window,” he said, but when I asked him to explain, he walked away.
AT dinner, it struck me that Julie was not digging into her fish sticks with much enthusiasm, although the same could not be said about her jam jar glass filled with pinot grigio.
“Sorry,” I said. “When I went to the store the other day I kind of loaded up on stuff that would be easy to throw together.”
“No, it’s great,” Julie said. “You’ll have to give me the recipe.”
Thomas said, “You just take the fish sticks box out of the freezer, put them on a metal tray, and put them in the oven. And then you put a glop of tartar sauce on them from the jar. Isn’t that right, Ray?”
“Yes, Thomas,” I said. “That’s pretty much it.”
“I could make this,” he said, nodding proudly to himself. Unlike Julie, he’d wolfed down the fish sticks and the french fries, which had also come out of a bag from the freezer.
“Really, it’s great,” Julie said. She looked across the table at me and said, “You’ve been kind of quiet.”
“I guess I’ve got a few things on my mind.”
“Like calling the police?” Thomas asked.
“What?”
“You said you were going to call the police in New York.”
“I haven’t done that yet,” I said. “I’ll get right on that tomorrow.”
If Thomas suspected I was being anything less than sincere, he didn’t show it. He got up from the table, took his plate to the sink and rinsed it off, and said he was going up to his room.
“Let me clean up,” Julie said.
“Just leave it,” I said. “Come on.” We took our jam jar glasses of wine into the living room and sat down on the couch.
“You’re not going to call the police, are you?” she asked. I had filled her in, briefly, on my trip to New York, Thomas’s call to the landlord, and my pledge to get in touch with the NYPD.
I shook my head. “No.”
Julie kicked off her shoes and curled her legs up on the couch. “I guess I get that.”
“You guess?”
“Yeah. I mean, it would be hard to explain, and hard to get anyone to listen to you. A blurry white head in a window. What the hell is that, anyway? I love Thomas, I do, but after what you told me about the FBI coming to visit, maybe keeping a low profile is a smart thing.” She knocked back the rest of her wine. “More?”
I nodded.
She hopped off the couch, opened another bottle, and brought it back. She refilled her glass and mine.
“There was something in your voice when you called me this afternoon,” Julie said. “You sounded kind of, I don’t know, shaky.”
I let the wine surround my tongue a few seconds before answering. “I was having a moment of self-pity, I guess. Thinking about my dad, about Thomas. It was all getting me down at the moment. Look, I don’t want to burden you with all this shit.”
“It’s okay,” she said. No one spoke for a few seconds. Then, “I remember you in school, how you were always drawing things. Sometimes I’d see you, sitting on the floor in the hall, leaning up against your locker, a hundred kids shuffling around you and yelling and goofing around and slamming their lockers, and you’d be sketching something in your book, totally oblivious to everything that was going on around you. I’m like, always looking around at what’s going on, but there you were, in your own world, doing your thing.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess.”
“I think you and Thomas are more alike than you might think. He’s wrapped up in his world, but I can picture you, back in Burlington, up in your studio all by yourself, just you and your airbrush or your pencil or your CAD program, letting out some image, some picture that’s been trapped in your head, setting it free.” She had some more wine. “I think I’m starting to feel this a little.”
I was, too, but not so much that my mind wasn’t still racing. “I keep thinking about how Dad died. The key in the OFF position, the blades—”
Julie put a finger on my lips. “Shh,” she said. “What was it you told Thomas? Let it go. Let it all go, just for a while.”
Julie put our glasses on the coffee table and snuggled in closer to me. I slipped my arms around her and placed my mouth on hers. This went on for a while until Julie said, “This ain’t high school anymore. We don’t have to stay on the couch.”
“Upstairs,” I said.
“I was thinking my place,” she said, clearly a reference to Thomas clicking away upstairs.
“He won’t be coming out of his room. Sometime around midnight, or later, he’ll hit the bathroom and brush his teeth and pack it in. We’re not going to see him before that.”
So we slipped upstairs. I steered Julie into the bedroom at the end of the hall, and over to the queen-sized bed my father had slept in, alone—so far as I knew—since my mother’s passing.
“Isn’t this your dad’s room?” Julie asked.
“This is where I’ve been s
leeping. Would you like to go out to the car, like last time?”
She gave me a look. “No, this’ll do.”
I barely had the door closed when Julie started unbuttoning my shirt. I slid my hands under her sweater and felt her warm skin under my palms. My mouth was on hers as we moved to the bed. Julie pushed me onto my back and straddled me, reaching down and unbuckling my belt.
“I know some excellent stress reduction techniques,” she said, swinging her legs back off me so she could slide off my jeans and boxers. She tossed them onto the floor, got back on top, crossed her arms to the opposite sides, and whisked her top off in one swift motion, exposing a lacy, purple bra. She gave her head a shake to get her hair back into place.
“Purple?” I said. “Is that the same—”
“Oh please. I was a skinny, 110-pound school brat.”
“Just asking.”
She reached behind her back in that way women can that makes you think their elbows are going to snap, and unhooked and tossed her bra in the direction of my jeans.
“Come here,” I said. She leaned over, allowing her nipples to brush lightly across my chest.
“Ray!”
Julie sat bolt upright. “Jesus!” she said under her breath.
My heart went off like a trip-hammer. “Fuck,” I whispered.
I could hear Thomas’s door open. “Ray! Come here! Ray?” I’d never heard him call for me this way before.
I went to call out, then stopped myself. I didn’t want to bring him in here. Julie half-naked. Me entirely so.
“Where are you?” he called. I heard the guest bedroom door open. “Ray? Are you in Dad’s room?”
Julie looked at me, wide-eyed. She whispered, “You have to do something.”
“Thomas! Give me a sec—”
The door flung open. Thomas walked straight in. Didn’t even look at Julie as she hopped off me and grabbed the bedspread to cover herself. As she did so, she exposed me, and my current state, completely.
Trust Your Eyes Page 24
