Never Saw It Coming: (An eSpecial from New American Library) (22 page)

Harry nodded understandingly. “I guess that’s the best way to look at it. What’s done is done. No turning back the clock.” I wondered if Harry was going to offer up another cliché, but instead he said, “He’s really off in his own little world, isn’t he?”

“You don’t know the half of it,” I said.

Two

I got into the car and drove back to my father’s house.

After Mom had died, I’d still thought of it for the longest time as my parents’ place, even though Dad was living there without her. It took a year or so for me to move past that. With Dad dead less than a week, I knew it was going to take a while before I could think of it as anything but his place.

But it wasn’t. Not anymore. It was mine.

And my brother’s.

I’d never lived here. There was a guest room where I always slept when I came to visit, but there were no mementoes from my childhood here. No dresser drawer with stashes of
Playboy
and
Penthouse
, no model cars on the shelves, no posters on the walls. My parents had bought this place when I was twenty-one. I’d already moved out of our house on Stonywood Drive, in the heart of Promise Falls. My parents had hoped one of their sons would make something of himself, but put that dream on hold when I bailed on my university career in Albany and gotten a job at a Beekman Street art gallery in Saratoga Springs.

My parents were never farmers, but when they’d spotted this place, it fit the bill. First, it was out in the country, several hundred yards from the closest neighbor. They’d have their privacy. Some isolation. It reduced the likelihood of another incident.

Second, it was still a relatively short drive to work for Dad. But instead of driving into Promise Falls, through the downtown, and out the other side, he’d take the bypass they finished back in the late 1970s. Dad liked working for P&L. He didn’t want to look for something closer to home.

Third, the house was charming, with its dormer windows and wraparound porch. Mom had loved to sit out there, three seasons out of the year. The place came with a barn, which Dad didn’t have much need for, other than to store tools and park the lawn tractor. But they both loved the look of the structure, even if it wasn’t storing hay every fall.

There was a lot of property, but my parents maintained only about two acres of it. Behind the house, the yard stretched out flat for about sixty feet, then sloped down and out of sight to a creek that wound its way to the river that flowed into the center of town and cascaded over Promise Falls.

I’d only been down to the creek once since I’d come home. A task awaited me there, when I finally felt up to it.

Some of the flat and treeless land, beyond where Dad maintained it, was rented to neighboring farm interests. For years, that had provided my parents with a secondary—if nominal—income. The closest woods were across the highway. When you turned in off the main road and started up the drive, the house and barn sat on the horizon like a couple of boxes on a flatcar. Mom always said she liked a long driveway because when she saw someone turn in—which was not, she’d have been the first to admit, often—it gave her plenty of time to steel herself.

“People don’t usually come to your door with good news,” she’d said on more than one occasion. It had certainly been her experience, most notably when she was a young girl, and officials of the U.S. government had come to inform her mother that her father would not be coming home from Korea.

I nosed the car close to the steps that led up to the porch, parking my four-wheel-drive Audi Q5 next to Dad’s ten-year-old Chrysler minivan. He didn’t think much of my German wheels. He questioned supporting the economies of nations we once fought. “I suppose,” he’d said a few months ago, “when they start importing cars from North Vietnam, you’ll buy one of those.” Since he was so concerned, I offered to return for him his beloved Sony TV with a screen big enough that he could actually see the puck when watching the Stanley Cup playoffs.

“It being a Japanese set and all,” I’d said.

“Touch that thing and I’ll knock your block off,” he’d said.

I took the porch steps two at a time, unlocked the front door—I hadn’t needed to take a house key from Dad’s ring; I’d always had one—and went into the kitchen. The clock on the wall said it was nearly four thirty. Time to start thinking about something for dinner.

I hunted around in the fridge to see what might be left in here from my father’s final trip to the grocery store. He wasn’t much of a cook, but knew the basics. He could boil water for pasta, or heat up an oven and throw a chicken in there. But for the days when he hadn’t the energy for anything that fancy, he’d stuffed the freezer with hamburgers and fish sticks and french fries and enough frozen dinners to start a Stouffer’s franchise.

I could make do with what was here for tonight, but tomorrow I was going to have to make a trip to the grocery store. The truth was, I wasn’t much of a cook myself, and back in Burlington, found many nights I couldn’t be bothered to make myself anything more ambitious than a bowl of Cheerios. I think, when you live alone, it’s hard to get motivated to make a real meal, or eat it in a proper way. Many nights I’d eat dinner standing in the kitchen, watching the news on the TV, or I’d take my plate of microwaved lasagna up to my studio and eat while I worked.

I opened the refrigerator. There were six cans of Bud in there. My father liked his beer affordable and basic. Part of me felt funny, dipping into his last six-pack, but it didn’t stop me from taking one out and cracking it.

“To you, Dad,” I said, raising the can, then taking a seat at the kitchen table.

The place was almost as neat as I’d found it. Dad was meticulous, which made the upstairs hall all the more difficult for him to accept. I attributed his fastidiousness to his time in the Army. Drafted, he did his two years, most of it overseas in Vietnam. He never talked about it. “It’s over,” he’d say anytime it came up. He was more inclined to credit his habits to his work in printing, where precision and attention to detail were everything.

I sat there, drinking Dad’s beer, working up the energy to defrost or nuke something. I cracked open another as I began pulling things out of the freezer. Given my unfamiliarity with this kitchen, I had to open several drawers to find place mats and cutlery and napkins.

When things were almost ready, I walked through the living room and rested my hand on the banister before heading upstairs. I cast my eye across the room: the checkered couch my parents brought here two decades ago from the house in Albany, the recliner my father always sat in to watch his Sony. The chipped coffee table they bought the same time as the couch.

While the furniture was dated, Dad didn’t skimp on the technology. There was the TV itself, a thirty-six-inch flat screen with HD that he’d bought a year ago to watch football and hockey. He liked his sports, even if he had to enjoy them alone. There was a DVD player, and one of those gadgets that allowed him to order up movies from the Internet.

He watched those by himself.

The living room looked like a million other living rooms. Normal. Nothing extraordinary.

That changed as you got to the top of the stairs.

My parents had tried, without success, to keep my brother’s obsession contained to his own room, but it was a losing battle. The hallway, which Mom had painted pale yellow years ago, was totally papered over, nearly every square inch covered up. Standing at the top of the stairs, looking down the second floor hall that led to the three bedrooms and a bathroom, I thought of how a World War II underground war room might have looked, with oversized maps of enemy territories pinned to the walls of the bunker, military strategists waving their pointers, planning their invasions. But in a war room, there would have been more order to the map arrangement. Maps of Germany, the cities within its borders, would no doubt be collected together along one part of the wall. France would have been on another. Italy nearby.

It seemed unlikely that any war planner worth his salt would tape a map of Poland next to one of Hawaii. Or have a street guide of Paris overlapping a gas station highway map of Kansas. Pin a topographical map of Algeria next to satellite shots of Melbourne. Staple, right into the wall, a tattered National Geographic map of India next to one of Rio de Janeiro.

This tapestry, this crazy quilt of maps that obscured every bit of wall in the hallway—it was as if someone had put the world into a blender and turned it into wallpaper.

Red streaks from a Magic Marker ran from map to map, making obscure, seemingly irrelevant connections. There were written notations everywhere. Across a map of Portugal was scribbled “236 miles,” for no apparent reason. Latitude and longitude numbers were jotted randomly up and down the hallway. Some destinations were adorned with photographs. A printout photo of the Sydney Opera House was stuck with a short piece of green painter’s tape to a map of Australia. A tattered shot of the Taj Mahal was stuck, with a glob of wadded gum, onto a map of India.

I don’t know how Dad, on his own, tolerated it. When Mom was alive, she was a buffer. Told her husband to get out of the house, go to a sports bar and watch a game with Lenny Prentice, or one of the others from work. Or Harry Peyton. How did Dad handle it, walking down this hall each and every day, week after week, month after month, trying to pretend there was nothing on the walls but the pale yellow paint he’d helped his wife roll on there so long ago?

I went to the first bedroom door, which was, as usual, closed. I raised my hand to rap lightly on it, but just before I touched my knuckles to wood, I listened.

I could hear talking on the other side of the door. A conversation, but only one voice. I wasn’t able to make out anything in particular.

I knocked.

“Yeah?” Thomas said.

I opened the door, wondering if maybe he’d been on the phone, but there was no receiver in his hand. I told him it was time for dinner, and he said he’d be right down.

Three

“Well, it sure is nice to hear from you.”

“Thank you for taking my call.”

“I don’t give my private line to just anyone. You’re a very special prospect.”

“I appreciate that, sir. I really do.”

“I got your latest e-mail message. Sounds like things are coming along very well.”

“Yes, they are.”

“Good to hear.”

“I’m still wondering . . . do you have any idea of the timing of the incident, sir?”

“If only we did. It’s like asking the exact moment when terrorists will hit next. We simply don’t know. But we have to be prepared for when, and if, that moment comes.”

“Of course.”

“And I know you’ll be ready. You’re going to be tremendously valuable to us. A wonderful resource.”

“You can count on me, sir.”

“You do appreciate that there is risk in what you’re doing?”

“I know.”

“Someone like you, there are forces hostile to our government that would be very glad to get their hands on you.”

“I’m aware, sir.”

“Good to know. Listen, I have to go. My wife gets back from a trip to the Mideast today.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. She’s got a lot on her plate, that’s for sure.”

“Is she sorry she didn’t get to become president?”

“I’ll tell ya, I don’t think she’s had a moment to think about it.”

“I suppose that’s true.”

“Anyway, carry on.”

“Thank you, thank you, Mr. President. It’s—it’s still proper to call you that, isn’t it?”

“Of course. You retain the title, even when you no longer hold the office.”

“I’ll be in touch.”

“I know you will.”

Four

“Let’s say you were staying at the Hotel Pont Royal and you wanted to get to the Louvre, how would you do that?” Thomas asked me. “Come on, this is a super-easy one.”

“What?” I said. “What city are you talking about?”

He sighed and looked at me sadly across the kitchen table, as though I were a child who had disappointed him by not knowing how to count to five. We looked a lot alike, Thomas and I. Both around five-eleven, thinning black hair, but Thomas had a few pounds on me. I was the slender Vince Vaughn from
Swingers
, Thomas the meatier Vince Vaughn from
The Break-Up
. I was definitely healthier looking, but that had nothing do with physical build. When you hardly went outside and spent twenty-three hours a day in your bedroom—he managed to pack breakfast, lunch, and dinner in the kitchen into three twenty-minute interruptions—you developed a pasty, washed-out complexion, an almost sickly pallor. He was probably suffering from a Vitamin D deficiency. He needed a week in Bermuda. And even though he’d never been there, he could probably name me all the hotels and tell me what streets they were on.

“I said
Louvre.
Doesn’t that give you some idea where I’m talking about? Louvre,
Louvre,
think about it.”

“Of course,” I said. “Paris. You’re talking about Paris.”

He nodded encouragingly, almost frenetically. He’d already finished the frozen meatloaf dinner I’d heated up in the microwave even though I wasn’t even halfway through my own and was unlikely to finish it. I’d have been happier with buttered foam core. He was sitting in the chair with his body twisted in the direction of the stairs, like he was getting ready to bolt back up there any second. “Right, so you want to get to the Louvre. Which way do you go?”

“I have no idea, Thomas,” I said tiredly. “I know where the Louvre is. I’ve been to the Louvre. I spent six whole days there when I was twenty-seven. I lived in Paris for a month. I took an art course. But I have no idea where this hotel is you’re talking about. I didn’t stay in a hotel. I was in a hostel.”

“The Pont Royal,” he said.

I gave him a blank look, waiting.

“On the Rue de Montalembert,” he said.

“Thomas, I have no fucking idea where—”

“It’s just off the Rue du Bac. Come on. It’s an old hotel, all gray stone, has a revolving door at the front that looks like it’s made of walnut or something like that and right beside it there’s a place that does x-rays or something, because it says mammography and radiology above the windows and above those are some apartments or something with some plants in the windows in clay pots and the building looks like it’s eight stories and on the left side there’s a very expensive-looking restaurant with a black awning thing and dark windows and it doesn’t have any tables and chairs out front like most of the cafés in Paris and—”

All this from memory.

“I’m really tired, Thomas. I had to go in and talk to Harry Peyton today.”

“The Louvre is like the simplest place to get to from there. You can almost
see
it when you come out of the hotel.”

“Do you not want to hear what happened at the lawyer’s?”

He waved his hands busily in front of me. “You go across the Rue de Montalembert and then across a triangle of sidewalk, and then you’re on the Rue du Bac, and then you go right and you walk up that way and you cross the Rue de l’Université and you keep going and you cross the Rue de Verneuil—I’m not sure I’m pronouncing these right because I never took French in high school—and there’s this place on the corner that has all these really good-looking pastries in the window and bread too and then you cross the Rue de Lille but you keep on going and—”

“Mr. Peyton said the way Dad’s will is set up, he left the house to both of us.”

“—and if you look straight down the street you can actually see it. The Louvre, I mean. Even though it’s on the other side of the river. You keep going and then you cross the Quai Anatole France on the left, and on the right it’s the Quai Voltaire, I guess the road changes from one name to the other there and you shift a bit to the right but keep going over the bridge, which is the Pont Royal. I think
pont
means bridge. And when you get to the other side you’re there. See how simple that was? You didn’t have to do any twists or turns or anything. You just go out the door and turn and you’re there. Let’s do a harder one. Name a hotel in any other part of Paris and I’ll tell you how to get there. Shortest route. Although, sometimes, there’s a hundred different ways to get to the same place but it’s still about the same distance. Like New York. Well, not like New York, because the streets are all over the place in Paris and not in square blocks, but you get what I mean, right?”

“Thomas, I need you to stop for a second,” I said patiently.

He blinked at me a couple of times. “What is it?”

“We need to talk about Dad.”

“Dad’s dead,” he said, again looking at me like I was short a few IQ points. Then, with something that looked like sorrow washing briefly over his face, he glanced out the window. “I found him. By the creek.”

“I know.”

“Dinner was late. I kept waiting for him to knock on the door and tell me that it was time to eat, and I was getting really hungry so I came down to see what was going on. I went all over the house first. I went down into the basement, thinking maybe he was fixing the furnace or something, but he wasn’t there. The van was here so he had to be somewhere. When I couldn’t find him in the house I went outside. I looked in the barn first.”

I’d heard all this before.

“When I couldn’t find him there I walked around and when I got to the top of the hill I saw him with the tractor on top of him.”

“I know, Thomas.”

“I pushed the tractor off him. It was really hard to do but I did. But Dad didn’t get up. So I ran back up here and called 911. They came and they said he was dead.”

“I know,” I said again. “That must have been pretty awful for you.”

“It’s still down there.”

The tractor. I had to bring it back up and put it away in the barn. It had been sitting out there at the bottom of the hill since the accident. I didn’t know whether it would start. For all I knew, the gas had all drained out when the machine was upside down. There was a half-f gas can in the barn if I needed it.

“There are things that we have to get figured out,” I said. “About what to do, now that Dad’s, you know, passed away.”

Thomas nodded, thinking. “I was wondering,” he said, “whether it would be okay to put maps on the walls in his bedroom now. I’m running out of space. Because he and Mom said I couldn’t put any on the first floor, or down the stairs, but his room is on the second floor so I was wondering what you thought about that since he’s not sleeping in there anymore. And with Mom already gone, no one’s sleeping in there.”

That wasn’t exactly true. I’d started off sleeping in the empty bedroom next to Thomas’s, the one Mom had always kept ready for me when I came to visit, which was not that often. But last night I ended up moving down the hall into Dad’s room because I could hear all the mouse-clicking through the wall and couldn’t take it anymore. I’d gone in once to tell Thomas to shut it down but he’d ignored me, so I’d switched beds. I felt funny about it at first, slipping under the covers of my dead father’s bed, but I got over it. I was tired, and I’m not much of a sentimentalist.

“You can’t live in this house all alone,” I said.

“I’m not alone. You’re here.”

“At some point I have to go back home.”

“You are home. This is home.”

“It’s not
my
home, Thomas. I live in Burlington.”

“Burlington, Vermont. Burlington, Massachusetts. Burlington, North Carolina. Burlington, New Jersey. Burlington, Washington. Burlington, Ontario, Ca—”

“Thomas.”

“I didn’t know if you knew how many other Burlingtons there are. You need to be specific. You need to say Burlington, Vermont, or people won’t know where you really live.”

“I figured you knew,” I said. “Is that what you want me to do? Every time I tell you I have to go back to Burlington, do you want me to add ‘Vermont,’ Thomas?”

“Don’t be angry with me,” he said.

“I’m not angry with you. But we do need to talk about some things.”

“Okay.”

“When I go back to my own house, I’m going to be worried about leaving you here on your own.”

Thomas shook his head, like there was nothing to worry about. “I’ll be fine.”

“Dad did everything around here,” I said. “He made the meals, he cleaned the house, he paid the bills, he went into town to get the groceries, he made sure the furnace was working and called the guy if there was something wrong with it. Anything else that broke, he fixed it. If the lights went off, he went down and flipped the breakers to get them back on. Do you know where the breaker panel is, Thomas?”

“The furnace works fine,” he said.

“You don’t have a driver’s license,” I said. “How are you going to get food into the house?”

“I’ll have it delivered,” he said.

“We’re out in the middle of nowhere. And who’s going to actually go to the grocery store and pick out the things you like?”

“You know what I like,” Thomas said.

“But I won’t be here.”

“You can come back,” he said. “Once a week, and get my food and pay the bills and see if the furnace is okay and then you can go back to Burlington.” He paused. “Vermont.”

“What about each day? Let’s say you’ve got some food in the house. Are you going to be okay making your own meals?”

Thomas looked away.

I leaned in a little closer to him, reached out, and touched his arm. “Look at me,” I said. He turned his head back reluctantly.

“Maybe,” I said, “if you made some changes in your routine, maybe you could take on some of these responsibilities yourself.”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“Well, maybe you need to manage your time better.”

He adopted a puzzled expression. “I manage my time very well.”

I took my hand away and placed both palms down on the table. “Tell me about that.”

“I do. I make very good use of my time.”

“Describe your day for me.”

“Which day? Like, a weekday, or the weekend?” He was stalling.

“Would you say your Monday-to-Friday routine is very different from your weekend routine?”

He thought on that. “I suppose not.”

“Then any day would be fine. You pick.”

Now he eyed me with suspicion. “Are you trying to make fun of me? Are you picking on me?”

“You said you use your time wisely, so tell me.”

“Well,” he said, “I get up around nine o’clock, and I have a shower, and then Dad makes me breakfast around nine thirty, and then I get to work.”

“Work,” I said. “Tell me about that.”

“You know,” he said.

“I just don’t think I’ve heard you call it work before. Tell me about that.”

“I go to work after breakfast, and I take a break for lunch, and then I go back to work until it’s dinnertime, and then I do some more work before I go to bed.”

“And that’s around, what, one, two, three in the morning?”

He nodded.

“Tell me about the work.”

“Why are you doing this, Ray?”

“I guess I’m thinking if you spent a little less time on this work, as you call it, you’d be in a better position to look after yourself. Thomas, it’s no secret you’ve got issues you’ve been dealing with for a very long time, and that they’re ongoing, and I get that. Just like Dad and Mom did. And, compared to plenty of other people who have the same thing as you, who aren’t able to shut out the voices or deal with other symptoms, you manage very well. You get up, you dress yourself, you and I can sit here and have a rational conversation about things.”

“I know,” Thomas said, somewhat indignantly. “I’m perfectly normal.”

“But the amount of time you spend on your . . . work stands to interfere with your ability to look after this house on your own, or live here by yourself, and if you’re not able to do that, then we’re going to have to look at some other arrangement.”

“What do you mean, another arrangement?”

I hesitated. “Living somewhere else. Maybe an apartment, in town. Or, and this is something I’ve only just started looking into, some sort of housing where you’d live with other people with similar issues, where there are staff who look after things you can’t look after yourself.”

“Why do you keep saying ‘issues’? I don’t have issues, Ray. I’ve had mental problems, which are very much under control. If you had arthritis, would you want me to say you had an issue with your bones?”

“I’m sorry. I was just . . .” I didn’t know what to say.

“Is this place where I would live a hospital? For crazy people?”

“I never said you were crazy, Thomas.”

“I don’t want to live in a hospital. The food’s terrible.” He looked at my unfinished meatloaf. “Even worse than that. And I don’t think a hospital room would have an Internet connection.”

“Nobody’s talking about a hospital. But maybe some kind of, I don’t know, a kind of supervised house. You could probably do your own cooking. I could teach you how to do that.”

“I can’t leave,” Thomas said matter-of-factly. “All my stuff is here. My work is here.”

“Thomas, you spend all but an hour of your waking day on the computer, wandering all over the world. Day after day, month after month. It’s not healthy.”

“It’s only a more recent development,” he said. “A few years ago, all I had was my maps and my atlases and my globe. There was no Whirl360. It’s so much better now. I’ve been waiting my whole life for something like this.”

“You’ve always been obsessed with maps, but—”

“
Interested.
I’ve always been
interested
in maps. I don’t say you’re obsessed with drawing silly pictures of people. I saw that one you did, of Obama, in the white coat with the stethoscope like he was a doctor, that ran in that magazine. I thought it made him look silly.”

“That was the point,” I said. “That was what the magazine wanted.”

“Well, would you call that an obsession? I think it’s just your job.”