Trust Your Eyes

TWENTY-ONE

The following morning, it was as though it had never happened.

Thomas came down for breakfast like it was any other day. Even though I hadn’t stopped feeling guilty about how I’d handled things after the visit from the FBI, Thomas was going about things the way he always did, which is to say, he stayed in his room and traveled the world.

So many things about him puzzled me. I wished I could get inside his head. He’d always been a mystery to me, even when we were kids. There was this bubble around him, something that kept me from getting through, and him from reaching out. I’d always wondered, why him and not me? Why was he the one to be-is afflicted the right word? — with psychiatric problems, and not me? How fair was that? Did God look down at my parents and think, “I’ll give them one with a good head on his shoulders, and the other-I’ll have a bit of fun with him.”

There was no shortage of theories about why Thomas was schizophrenic. When we were kids, bad parenting-or, more specifically, bad mothering-was often blamed, which didn’t go over well with our mom, who was a patient, loving woman. A nurturing woman, she’d have been more likely to mitigate the effects of someone’s mental distress rather than exacerbate it. Over time, other theories came to the fore. It was genetic. Environmental. A chemical imbalance in the brain. Stress. A childhood trauma. Processed foods. A combination of all of those things.

Or maybe something else entirely.

The bottom line was, no one really knew anything. I could no more explain why Thomas was the way he was than I could explain why I was the way I was. And Thomas, while troubled, was also tremendously gifted. His ability to remember all the things he saw while on Whirl360 was beyond my ability to comprehend. I asked him once if he’d be happier without this so-called gift, and he threw it right back at me. Would I be happier if I had no artistic ability? What I judged to be his curse, he saw as his talent. This was what made him different. This was what made him proud. His obsession was his source of pleasure. And when you thought about it, wasn’t that true of all talented people?

I just didn’t know.

What I did know was that my parents did everything they could to help Thomas, and loved him unreservedly. They took him to doctors. They took him to specialists. They met with all his teachers. They never stopped worrying about him. Often, as the older brother, I was drawn into that circle of anxiety. Once-I think I was fifteen at the time-Thomas had been missing for hours. He’d often get on his bike and wander Promise Falls, mapping it, learning every square inch of it. He’d return, his notebook filled with street plans, detailed right down to the placement of the stop signs and fire hydrants.

This particular day, he hadn’t returned home in time for dinner. That wasn’t like Thomas.

“Go see if you can find him,” Mom said.

I hopped on my bike and headed downtown. It struck me that that was where I’d find him. The crisscross of streets was more intricate downtown, and offered more entertainment value for someone with Thomas’s interests. I couldn’t find him.

But I found his bike.

It was tucked in an alley off Saratoga, between a barbershop and the Promise Falls Bakery, which made the best lemon tarts in the history of the universe. I thought maybe Thomas had gone in there for one, but the lady behind the counter had not seen him.

I went up the street and back, checking into every business, asking if anyone had seen my brother. At one point, I stood on the sidewalk out front of a shoe store, overcame my fear of drawing attention to myself, and shouted: “Thomas!”

When I went back to where I’d found his bike, it was gone.

I pedaled home furiously, getting there about ten minutes after he’d returned. Thomas was particularly sullen, never saying a word through dinner. But that night, I heard him in the basement, arguing with our father, or, more accurately, Dad speaking angrily to him. I figured Thomas was getting chewed out for going AWOL, but when I asked him about it later, he said it was nothing.

Whatever he’d been up to that day never came up again.

I was sitting at the kitchen table, pondering these and other weighty issues and watching Thomas eat his cereal, when I said, “Instead of making dinner, I have something else for you to do.”

He looked up from his bowl. “What?” He sounded alarmed.

“The house. It needs a cleaning.”

He scanned the kitchen and out to the living room. “It looks good to me.”

“It needs a vacuuming. A lot of stuff gets walked in here. I’ll clean the bathrooms, you vacuum the house.”

“Dad always did the cleaning,” he said. When I said nothing, he added, “He just always did it. I’ve never used the vacuum.”

“Do you agree that the house needs to be cleaned?” I asked.

Slow to answer. Finally, “I guess.”

“Well, if Dad’s no longer here, how do you think we should solve that problem? It’s the two of us living here, at least for now, and I want to include you in the problem solving around here.”

“I suppose,” he said thoughtfully, “you could do it.”

“I’m already doing the grocery shopping. And I’ve been making the meals. And dealing with the lawyer. And, Thomas, I have a job. I’m either going to have to nip back to Burlington-”

He started to say it, but I held up my finger as a warning and stopped him.

“I’m either going to have to nip back to Burlington, or I’m going to have to work here. Either way, I have things to do.”

“Me, too,” he said.

“That’s true. I figured, if I have to cut into my work time to get errands done, then it’s only fair that you should, too.”

Thomas’s eyes darted about nervously. “I don’t know where the vacuum is.”

I pointed to the closet near the back door. “It’s right in there.”

“When did you want me to do this for you?” he asked.

“You have to understand, Thomas, that you’re not doing this for me. This is something for the household. Pitching in, sharing chores, we do that for each other, and for ourselves. You get where I’m coming from?”

“Yes. I guess so. So when do you want me to do this?”

I raised my hands. “What about now? You get it out of the way, you’ve got the rest of your day free. That’s all I’m going to ask you to do today.”

“How many rooms do I have to do?”

“All of them,” I said.

“The basement?”

“Okay, skip the basement.”

“What about the stairs?”

“Yes, the stairs.” His shoulders slumped, already feeling the weight of the assignment. “Go haul out the vacuum, I’ll show you the basics.”

He pushed back his chair, went to the closet, and dragged out the machine with all the grace and familiarity of a yak handling a set of golf clubs.

“How do you plug it in?” he asked. “The plug only comes out an inch. It won’t reach the wall.”

“Press your foot on that pad there-no, right next to that-and then you can pull out the cord. Keep pulling until it won’t come out any more.” I stood up. “Let me show you a few things.”

I gave him a brief lesson. How to turn it on and off, when to use the power head, and what the various attachments were for. “This is for carpet,” I said, “and this is for bare wood floors.”

“What about tile?” he asked.

“Same as a bare wood floor. Just keep going over the whole floor. Nothing to it.”

I might have looked like Thomas did had someone dropped me into the cockpit of the space shuttle. At my urging, he flipped the switch and the machine roared to life. I shouted, “I’ve got some mail and stuff to deal with, so I’ll leave you be.”

I’d come back to Promise Falls in such a rush that I hadn’t packed a laptop; I was using the e-mail program on my cell, and any correspondence that required a reply of more than a few words was a pain to type out on the phone’s keypad. Plus, I knew I had a few bills that needed to be paid, which I could do online.

Dad had a laptop, the second he’d owned. “This one is lighter, faster,” he’d said to me in a message a few months ago. He’d started reading newspapers online, but still bought a print one every day. He said it was for the local ads, but it was really about the ritual of getting into the car and driving down to the store to buy one. It was his daily morning adventure. He always got a coffee, too, and was still home in time to make Thomas breakfast.

He kept the computer on the kitchen counter. I took it out with me onto the porch. The wireless signal worked out there, and I wanted to get away from the noise of the vacuum. I took in Thomas’s technique as I walked past. He was stooped over as he wandered the floor, like he was actually hunting for the dust he had to suck up. He evidently believed the power head needed to rest atop each section of carpet for several seconds to do its job. At this rate, he wasn’t going to get up to his room until noon.

I sat in one of the wicker chairs, opened up the computer, and hit the power button. I probably could have used a sweater out there, but it wasn’t cool enough to make me want to go back inside and find one.

I entered the password to get into my e-mail program. Some junk, a couple of notes from Jeremy Chandler, a message from an editor at the Washington Post praising my last illustration, which depicted Congress as a sandbox full of children.

Inside, it sounded like the vacuum had just sucked up a squirrel. Thomas had undoubtedly caught the carpet fringe. He’d figure it out.

I found the Web site for the Promise Falls Standard. I couldn’t find a specific e-mail address for Julie, but under Contact Us it said you could reach a reporter by typing in their first initial followed by last name and then @pfstandard. com.

So I was able to write Julie:

Thanks for the beer, and making the time to talk. It was nice to see you again. Like I said, if you’re driving by, pop in and say hi to Thomas.

I hit “send.”

She’d been on my mind since our meeting at Grundy’s, and I was hoping she’d take me up on the invitation. I hadn’t spent much time with her, but it was long enough to realize she was easy to talk to. You could speak plainly to her, no bullshit. And I didn’t have many people to talk to these days. I really couldn’t talk to Thomas. I mean, could I? When all he really cared about was getting back to his Whirl360? He was more concerned with assisting the CIA with a nonexistent global catastrophe than he was with helping me figure out what to do with the house and him.

I sighed and opened up Safari. I wanted to look into the residence Laura Grigorin had suggested might be a good place for Thomas. I went up to the corner of the screen to enter some key words into Google.

As soon as I began to type, a list of previous searches popped up onto the screen. These would have been the things Dad was looking up the last time he used this computer. Before he died.

I glanced at the list. It was short. Three items. smartphones depression child prostitution

I stared at the list a long time. Felt the world getting ready to open up and swallow me whole.

The door opened. “I think the vacuum’s broken,” Thomas said.