The Wally Lamb Fiction Collection: The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much is True, We Are Water, and Wishin' and Hopin'

by Lamb, Wally

  And now what?

  Turning to me, Thomas said something I couldn’t hear over the roar of the water. I cupped my hand against my ear and leaned closer. “What?”

  “I said, this is a holy place.”

  I nodded. Stiffened a little. The Holy Roller rides again, I thought. But as I looked into his eyes, I felt my annoyance turning into something else. Pity, maybe? Relief? Love? I couldn’t say, exactly. I started to cry. Like I said, my emotions were all over the map.

  Thomas asked me if I believed in God.

  I didn’t answer him at first. Groped around for some response that wouldn’t trigger one of his Jesus speeches. Then I said something I hadn’t planned on at all.

  “I wish I did.”

  He took a step closer to me. Reached over and put his arm around me. In my peripheral vision, I could see his stump.

  “The Lord Jesus Christ is your savior, Dominick,” he said. “Trust me. I enflesh the word of God.”

  “You do, huh?” I said. “Well, whattaya know?” With the sleeve of my jacket, I wiped the tears out of my eyes. Took a step or two away from his embrace.

  Neither of us said anything else for a while—two or three minutes, maybe. It was me who finally broke the silence. “Know what someone told me once?” I said. “That this river is life—that all it’s doing is flowing from the past into the future and passing us along the way. . . . Kind of puts things in perspective, doesn’t it?”

  He kept looking at me. Said nothing.

  “Hey, speaking of the past,” I said. “You know what I’ve been reading? Papa’s life story. Our grandfather. . . . He dictated this whole long thing before he died. In Italian. I had it translated. . . . Ma gave it to me. To both of us.”

  “Papa,” Thomas repeated.

  “You remember the way she’d go on and on about him? Papa this, Papa that. . . . Turns out, though, that he wasn’t quite the big superhero she made him out to be. He was, I don’t know . . . he was mean. Some of this stuff I’m reading is really—”

  “Can we walk down to the water?” Thomas asked.

  “What?” It miffed me a little, him interrupting me—not giving a shit about it.

  He wanted to take his shoes and socks off, he said. Wade into the river.

  The water was too cold right now, I said. I’d take him back there again when it got warmer and he could wade as much as he wanted. In June, maybe, when the mountain laurel came out. “Come on,” I said. “You hungry? I’m getting hungry.”

  I’d planned just to grab some stuff at the drive-thru. Going out in public was something I figured I’d reintroduce him to gradually. And restaurants were always a wild card with Thomas—even before Hatch. But when we pulled into the parking lot at McDonald’s, who pulls in right behind us, honking, but Leo. He jabbed his finger, pointing to the parking space next to his.

  Leo talked too loud. Shook Thomas’s hand a little too vigorously. He insisted we join him inside—that we let him treat us both to lunch. Since our victory against Dr. Hume, Leo had begun calling himself Victor Sifuentes, after that guy on L.A. Law. Righter of legal wrongs in his designer suits. He didn’t really get it; it was all play-acting for Leo. But this was partly his celebration, too, I thought. So we went inside.

  The whole friggin’ place was decorated in Little Mermaid. The bright lights and colors, the jostling into the crowded line: it made my brother edgy. He kept squinting, blinking his eyes. At the register, Leo and I gave the woman our orders and I turned to Thomas. “You know what you want?” I asked him. He just kept staring up at the menu board, dazed.

  “He’ll have a Big Mac and a shake,” I told the cashier. “What kind of shake you want, Thomas? Chocolate?”

  He said he wanted a Happy Meal.

  “Thomas,” I said. “Those things are just for little kids.”

  “Oh, that’s okay,” the counter woman butted in. “He can get one if he wants. Anyone can buy them.”

  I told her thanks, but he didn’t want one.

  “Yes, I do,” he insisted.

  “Come on, Birdsey,” Leo said. “If my man here wants a Happy Meal, then that’s what I’m buying him. What kind you want, Thomas? They got hamburger, cheeseburger, McNuggets.”

  “McNuggets,” Thomas said. “And black coffee for my drink.”

  The cashier told us Happy Meals didn’t come with coffee. Just soda or milk.

  “Get him a coffee if he wants a coffee,” Leo told her. “Charge me extra for it.”

  When she went to get our stuff, Leo recited lines from some movie: something about a chicken salad sandwich, hold the bread, hold the chicken between your legs. Shut up, I felt like telling him. It had been a mistake to come here. I’d wanted to take things slow, keep everything nice and simple. I felt scared. Felt like screaming at someone.

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” Thomas said.

  “Oh. Okay. I’ll go with you,” I said. “Leo can get our stuff.”

  Thomas said I didn’t need to go with him.

  “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, Domini
ck—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, b
ad, 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.