Thomas had changed. I never knew whether the priest had gone as far with him as with some of the other boys, but I lost my little brother and an angry stranger took his place. I hung his death mask on my wall, its sweet expression forever banished now from its living owner, but infinitely precious to me, especially as Thomas grew older and got into his various troubles.
What were his troubles? Oh, the usual for Tennessee teenagers of a certain class. By which I mean lower, as my family wasn’t exactly high on the social ladder in Gatlinburg. Petty shoplifting. Possession of marijuana, of course, but small amounts, nothing to get him jail time. Thomas came home wired and irrational a couple times, and admitted to me privately that he’d gone out to the country with some friends and bought some meth (easy enough to find around there). Luckily, he didn’t take to it, preferred the gentle dullness of weed to being hopped up to the point of bursting. Then he did some significant vandalism to the church, breaking the large stained-glass windows behind the altar. He and a friend accumulated a wheelbarrow full of large rocks and stood in the woods behind the church and hurled them upwards, until the tall windows were completely shattered. He got caught (go figure), the shards of glass in his clothes that he hadn’t bothered to wash, but by then he was on the list of usual suspects for this kind of thing anyway. It’s a relatively small town, after all. Poor kid. He didn’t have much of a chance.
I watched Thomas throw his life away and knew there was nothing I could do to help while I was on the inside. I was smart, and knew it, and determined to get through school and out of Gatlinburg, but got entangled with a local boy when I’d barely finished my second year at Carson-Newman Junior College over in Jefferson City. Our two children were born when I was twenty and twenty-one, and when I was twenty-two I packed them up while their father was working the afternoon shift at the Odditorium. I turned the car away from my parents’ house and headed straight west. My only goals were to put my feet in the Pacific Ocean, make sure my babies didn’t have the Tennessee twang—and help Thomas escape one day as well. How I ended up in Northern rather than Southern California was the result of a wrong turn onto the I-5 outside Bakersfield. The babies were squalling, it was two in the morning, and I got on the ramp heading north rather than south to LA like I’d intended. Nevertheless, it worked out okay.
San Francisco blew my mind. I remember arriving at Ocean Beach at about four on a Sunday afternoon in June. I didn’t know it then, but it was one of those rare sunny days over on that side of the city, and I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. I stuck my feet in the frigid water for about two seconds, splashed a little on my babies’ faces to make them laugh, and set out to build us a new life. Three years later, after bartending nights at various local joints while subjecting my kids to a series of mediocre babysitters, I finally had both my divorce and my degree in accounting from San Francisco State. People tell me I still have a bit of the Tennessee twang, especially when I get tired or excited. But both my boys talk like the native Californians they almost are.
The boys are good boys. Though the one dark spot on my marriage to John was that he didn’t get on with them, or they with him. I think after having me to themselves for more than twenty years they didn’t like to share.
They’ve both been calling a lot since the news got out. They’re worried about me, whether I’ll get by okay. But I stay up nights concerned about them. Especially Jackson, the younger one. He’s a little too keen on get-rich-quick schemes, and has more avarice in his bones than I like to see in a son of mine.
My brother’s another matter, another one to worry about. He eventually followed me to San Francisco a couple years after I escaped. He’s still what I would call broken. He’s had his share of relationships, some with women, more with men, but none of them seem to last. I think the last boyfriend had a bit of a temper. On the one occasion I had them to dinner they were both injured, Thomas with the remnant of a black eye and his boyfriend noticeably limping. I took Thomas into John’s office and read him the riot act. “I don’t care who you sleep with as long as you treat each other well, and I just don’t see that happening here,” I told him. Thomas shuffled his feet and mumbled, and then on the way out put his fist through our front window. That’s how things take him.
For Thomas, John had a surprising amount of patience. Perhaps he could tell how important Thomas is to me. But he was generous and forgiving in many instances where he didn’t need to be.
Thomas has a lot of natural talent as a graphic designer, is self-taught on the computer and doesn’t have any trouble finding work when he puts his mind to it. I wish he’d put his mind to it more often. He’s a bit of a lost soul. But he’s my baby brother, and I love him dearly. I would do anything for him, and he knows it.
23
Samantha