I sat on the edge of the bed, which put me at a ninety-degree angle to him as he stared at the screen.
Thomas said, “Let’s say you come out of the Opera House on Bow Street in Covent Garden and you want to get to Trafalgar Square. Do you turn right and walk down to the Strand, or left and go up to—”
“Thomas, stop. I need to talk to you.”
“Just tell me which way you think.”
“Left.”
“Wrong. The faster way would be to go right, down to the Strand, then right and keep on going.” He turned and looked at me. “You can’t miss it.”
“Can you stop for a second?”
Thomas nodded.
“I want to ask you a few things. Things about Dad.”
“What?”
“Okay, first, the day Dad died, did you go out and talk to him when he was cutting grass on the side of the hill?”
Thomas cocked his head to one side. “I was going to. I was looking for him.”
“You didn’t go out, even to give him a phone message or anything? Something that made him turn off the machine and lift up the blades?”
“No,” he said again. “The only time I went out was to find him because I was hungry.”
“And he was trapped under the tractor.”
He nodded.
“The two of you, you got along pretty well most of the time, didn’t you?”
“Sometimes he got angry with me,” Thomas said. “You’ve asked me about this before.”
“Did you—I don’t know how to ask this without it sounding like I’m accusing you of something.”
Thomas showed no concern. “What is it?”
“Did you try to push Dad down the stairs?”
“Did Dad tell you about that?”
Would it be better if he thought our father had told me, or to admit I’d learned this from Len Prentice?
I sidestepped. “Is it true?”
Thomas nodded. “Yes. Sort of.”
“What happened? When was this?”
“About a month ago.”
“Tell me about it.”
“He wanted to talk about something that happened a long time ago,” Thomas said, glancing back at the London street scene on his monitor.
“What? Something that happened to Dad?”
“No. Something that happened to me.”
“To you? What happened to you?”
“I’m not supposed to talk about it. Dad told me not to.” He paused. “At the time. He told me I wasn’t ever to talk about it or he’d get really angry with me.”
“Jesus, Thomas, what are you talking about here? When was this?”
“When I was thirteen.”
“Dad did something to you when you were thirteen that he told you never to talk about?”
My brother hesitated. “Not…no, not exactly.”
“Thomas, look, whatever happened, it was a long time ago, and Dad’s gone. If there’s something you need to tell me, then you can do it.”
“There’s nothing I want to tell you. President Clinton says I’m not supposed to talk about this stuff. It makes me look weak. And I’m just on my way to Trafalgar Square.”
“Okay, but, Thomas, can we just go back to the thing that happened a month ago. What was that about?”
“Dad wanted to talk about the thing that happened when I was thirteen.”
“Had you ever talked about it all these years?”
Thomas shook his head. “No.”
“But out of the blue, Dad wanted to talk about it again?” I was grasping here, trying to figure out what the hell Thomas was talking about, what this thing was that had happened twenty-two years ago.
“Yes.”
“Why?’
“He said maybe he was wrong, maybe he’d done a bad thing, and that he was sorry about it. Dad was following me up the stairs, saying he wanted to talk to me about it, but I didn’t want to talk about it. I’d tried really, really hard not to think about it for all those years and so I stopped and turned around and said I didn’t want to talk about it and that if he didn’t want to listen to me when I was thirteen why did he want to listen to me now and I put my hand out to stop him from following me and I didn’t push hard but he tripped on the stair and he fell a little bit.”
“Fell a little bit?”
Thomas nodded.
“Could you explain that?”
“We were on the fourth step going up, so he didn’t fall very far. He landed flat on his back.”
“Jesus, Thomas. What did you do?”
“I said I was sorry, and I helped him get into the chair and I got him one of his ice packs. I was sad that he fell.”
“Did he go to the hospital? Or the doctor?”
“No. He took some extra-strength Advils.”
“He must have been furious with you.”
Thomas shook his head in the negative. “No. He said it was okay. He said he understood. He said I was entitled to be mad, and if I didn’t forgive him, he’d live with that. And the pills started to work, and he started to feel better, but it hurt for about a week.”