“I’ll read the map, Dad,” he offered.
Dad ignored him at first, but Thomas persisted. Finally Dad figured, what the hell, let the kid think he was being useful. But Thomas wasn’t playing some game. He wasn’t pretending to navigate, the way some children, long before they know how to read, will rhyme off words when they open the pages of a book.
Thomas only had to glance at it for a few seconds before he said something like, “Just stay on 90 for another ten miles then get off and go east on 22.”
“Let me have a look at that,” Dad said, taking the map back and studying it over the steering wheel.
“I’ll be damned,” he said. “The kid’s right.”
Thomas was always right when it came to reading maps.
I’d try to snatch them from him, figuring that, as the elder sibling, I should be the navigator. It tore me apart to see my father consulting my baby brother for assistance.
“Raymond!” my father would shout at me. “Leave your damn brother alone and let him do his job! He knows what he’s doing.”
I’d look at Mom, hoping for some sort of support. “You have things you’re good at, too,” she’d say to me. “But Thomas is really good at this.”
“What am I good at?” I asked.
She had to think. “You’re a really good drawer. Maybe you could draw some pictures of the places we visit on our trip. That would be fun.”
How patronizing was that? We had a camera. What the hell purpose was served by my providing artistic renderings of the tourist attractions we visited? How was that supposed to help? Insulted, I reached into the case where I kept paper and pencils and safety scissors that I brought along to entertain myself on these trips and handed her an untouched sheet of black construction paper.
“That’s the Carlsbad Caverns,” I told her. We had been there the day before. “You can frame it when we get home.”
There was a hint of things to come, where Thomas was concerned, during a summer trip to a lodge in southern Pennsylvania, about an hour and a half southeast of Pittsburgh, when I was eleven and Thomas was nine. It was a stately old resort built on the side of a mountain; looking back, the place puts me in mind of the Overlook Hotel from the Stephen King movie The Shining, but there wasn’t blood flowing out of the elevators or a dead woman in a bathtub or some little kid pedaling a Big Wheel flat out down the hallways. There was mini-golf, and a pool, and bingo nights, and cookies and lemonade on the porch every afternoon at four. It was a fun week, but the most memorable part of the vacation was the drive home, when Dad decided to deviate from the route Thomas had prepared for him.
Thomas had spent several days—ignoring Mom’s pleas that he come for a swim or play horseshoes—figuring out that we needed to take 99 north up through Altoona, and while we started out intending to go that way, Mom decided she wanted to go home by way of Harrisburg, just in case there was any good shopping there, and that meant going east on 76. It would take us quite a few miles out of our way.
“You can’t do that!” Thomas said from the back seat once he got wind of this. “We have to take 99!”
“Your mother wants to go to Harrisburg, Thomas,” Dad said. “It’s not a big deal.”
“I spent all week planning the route!” He was starting to cry.
“Why don’t you start plotting out a different route home from Harrisburg?” Mom suggested. “That would be fun.”
“No! We have to go the way the map says,” Thomas insisted.
“Listen, son, we’re just going to—”
“No!”
“Jesus, Ray? Get out some games or something and play with your brother. Where’s the Mad Libs book?”
But now Thomas had undone his seat belt and gotten up on his knees on his seat, and was starting to bang his head against the window.
Dad said, “What the f— “
“Thomas!” Mom shouted.
I grabbed for him but he pushed me away. He kept banging his head against the window. A small smear of blood appeared on the glass.
Dad swung the car over onto the shoulder. Mom jumped out, nearly losing her footing on the gravel, and opened the back door. She wrapped her arms around my brother, pulling his bruised and bloodied head to her breast.
“It’s okay,” she said. “We’re going to take 99. We’re going to go home just the way you said.”
*