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 Somewhat withdrawn, shy, but no indication that he was troubled in any serious way.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.
“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 backseat 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.”