“Does she still have a bod?” He asked this without a hint of lasciviousness, like he wanted to know whether she was still driving a Subaru.
“I would say yes,” I said. “Did you guys . . . did you have a thing?”
“A thing?” He really didn’t know.
“Did you go out?”
“No,” he said. I could have guessed. Thomas had never had a steady girlfriend, and had only gone on dates a handful of times that I could remember. His odd, inward nature didn’t help, but I was never all that sure he cared about girls to begin with. Back when I was hiding skin mags under the mattress, Thomas was already amassing his huge map collection.
“But I liked her,” Thomas said. “She rescued me.”
I cocked my head, trying to recall. “That time, with the Landry twins?”
Thomas nodded. He’d been walking home from school when Skyler and Stan Landry, a couple of bullies with the combined IQ of a bucket of primer, had blocked his path and taunted him about how he talked to himself in class. They were starting to push him around when Julie McGill showed up.
“What’d she do?”
“She yelled at them to leave me alone. Stood between them and me. Called them cowards. And something else.”
“What else?”
“Fuckheads.”
I nodded. “Yeah, I remember.”
“It was kind of embarrassing, a girl standing up for you,” Thomas said. “But they’d have beat me up good if she hadn’t come by. Is there going to be any dessert?”
“Huh? Uh, I don’t know. I think I saw the end of a container of ice cream in the freezer there.”
“Could you bring it up to me? I’ve been down here longer than I planned and I need to get back.” He was already on his feet.
“Yeah, sure,” I said.
“I saw something,” Thomas said.
“What?”
“I saw something. On the computer. I think it would be okay for you to have a look at it. I don’t think it would violate any security clearance or anything.”
“What is it?”
“You should just take a look at it. It would take too long to explain.”
“Can you give me a hint?” I asked.
And he said again, “You should take a look at it.” He paused. “When you bring up the ice cream.”
Five
I went up to Thomas’s room five minutes later. There was a tub of vanilla in the freezer and I was just barely able to scrape out enough for one small serving, which was fine, because I didn’t have much of an appetite.
I should have known better than to think I could reason things out with Thomas about how he spent his days. My parents had tried for years without success. I was a fool to think I could accomplish anything different. My brother was who he was. He’d always been this way and there was every reason to believe he always would.
The signs came early. At least some of them. The fascination with maps revealed itself when he was around six. At the time, my parents thought it was pretty cool. When guests came over they’d show off Thomas the way parents of a child piano prodigy would make him play something by Brahms. “Pick a country,” Dad would say to visitors. “Any country.”
My parents’ friends, not really sure what it was Thomas did, would finally come up with one. “Argentina,” they might say. And then Thomas, a pencil and notepad in hand, would sketch out the country. Add some dots for cities and label them. Write in the names of neighboring nations. Then he’d hand it over for perusal.
The thing was, our visitors generally didn’t know Argentina from Arkansas, and didn’t have a clue whether the map they’d been handed was accurate, so Dad would pull an atlas off the shelf, open it to Argentina, and say, “Look at that! Will ya look at that? Can you believe it? He even got the city of Mendoza in just the right spot. Kid’s going to be a cartographer or something, I guarantee it.”
If Thomas minded being offered up as a parlor trick, he never voiced an objection. At the time, he just seemed like a very gifted baby brother. Somewhat withdrawn, shy, but no indication that he was troubled in any serious way.
That would come soon enough.
My parents were proud as could be of him. Me, not so much. At least not on family vacations, when Mom would pack everyone’s bag and Dad would load them into the trunk and we’d hit the road for Atlantic City or Florida or Boston. Mom had no sense of direction and had a terrible time reading the road maps the gas stations gave out, although she was a genius at folding them back up perfectly.
So Dad would read the map. When people today talk about the dangers of sending text messages while driving, I want to laugh. My father, had there been smartphones back then, could have tapped out Moby Dick while navigating the Buffalo bypass. He’d have Mom fold the map to a manageable size, drape it over the top of the steering wheel, and glance down every couple of seconds as we roamed across America.
Until Thomas got to be seven.