That was unthinkable. My thoughts were running wild again, even worse than when I’d found “child prostitution” in the search field of Dad’s laptop. My mind was going places it had no business going.
It was stress, I told myself. The stress of losing my father, of having to take responsibility for Thomas-it was taking a toll.
I hadn’t even taken time to grieve. When had I had a chance? From the moment I’d arrived at my father’s house, I’d been thrown right into it. Making funeral arrangements, meeting with Harry Peyton, looking after Thomas, taking him to see Laura Grigorin.
Only now was I realizing how adrift I felt without Dad, without his guidance and steady hand.
“I miss you,” I found myself saying aloud, my hands gripped on the steering wheel. “I need you.”
I steered the car over to the shoulder, stopped, put it in park, and rested my forehead on the top of the steering wheel for a moment.
I hadn’t cried once since getting the phone call from the Promise Falls police about my father’s death. Now it was taking everything I had to keep the lid on. Maybe I was more like my father than I’d realized. I kept things bottled up, didn’t share my problems with others.
I loved my father. And I felt lost without him here beside me.
I got out my phone. A few seconds later, someone said, “ Standard. Julie McGill here.”
“Why don’t you come out to the house for dinner tonight?”
“Is this George Clooney?”
“Yes.”
“Sure.”
WHEN I walked into the kitchen I saw a tuna sandwich sitting on a plate on my side of the table. There was a napkin folded at the side, and an opened bottle of beer that was now warm to the touch.
“Son of a bitch,” I said to myself. “He made my lunch.” I knew I’d asked him to, but I guess my expectations had been low. I felt bad.
I knocked on Thomas’s door and stepped in.
“Thanks for making me a sandwich,” I said.
“No problem,” he said, his back to me.
“Where are you?” I asked.
“London,” he said.
“How is it?”
“Old,” Thomas said.
“Did you eat? I hope you weren’t waiting for me.”
“I ate. And I put my plate and my glass and the bowl I mixed up the tuna and mayonnaise in into the dishwasher.”
“Thanks, man. We’re going to have a guest for dinner.”
“Who?”
“Julie.”
“Okay.”
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
