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.”
Len must have noticed my father was in pain and asked what he’d done to himself. Maybe Dad had related what happened, but not made a big deal about it. Len had said Dad made excuses for Thomas, which seemed to match the version of the tale my brother was telling me.
But what was Dad sorry about? And why didn’t Thomas want to talk about it? What did my dad think he wouldn’t want to forgive him for?
I said, “There’s something, some incident, Dr. Grigorin said you won’t talk about. Is it this? This thing Dad was apologizing for?”
Thomas nodded without hesitation.
“You need to tell me,” I implored. “I need to know.”
“No you don’t. It doesn’t matter. He’s not going to hurt me again.”
“Dad? Dad can’t hurt you anymore?”
Thomas shook his head. I didn’t know whether he was saying no, or dismissing me. “Dad would have believed me if you’d looked up at the window,” he said, but when I asked him to explain, he walked away.
AT dinner, it struck me that Julie was not digging into her fish sticks with much enthusiasm, although the same could not be said about her jam jar glass filled with pinot grigio.
“Sorry,” I said. “When I went to the store the other day I kind of loaded up on stuff that would be easy to throw together.”
“No, it’s great,” Julie said. “You’ll have to give me the recipe.”
Thomas said, “You just take the fish sticks box out of the freezer, put them on a metal tray, and put them in the oven. And then you put a glop of tartar sauce on them from the jar. Isn’t that right, Ray?”
“Yes, Thomas,” I said. “That’s pretty much it.”
“I could make this,” he said, nodding proudly to himself. Unlike Julie, he’d wolfed down the fish sticks and the french fries, which had also come out of a bag from the freezer.
“Really, it’s great,” Julie said. She looked across the table at me and said, “You’ve been kind of quiet.”
“I guess I’ve got a few things on my mind.”
“Like calling the police?” Thomas asked.
“What?”
“You said you were going to call the police in New York.”
“I haven’t done that yet,” I said. “I’ll get right on that tomorrow.”
If Thomas suspected I was being anything less than sincere, he didn’t show it. He got up from the table, took his plate to the sink and rinsed it off, and said he was going up to his room.
“Let me clean up,” Julie said.
“Just leave it,” I said. “Come on.” We took our jam jar glasses of wine into the living room and sat down on the couch.
“You’re not going to call the police, are you?” she asked. I had filled her in, briefly, on my trip to New York, Thomas’s call to the landlord, and my pledge to get in touch with the NYPD.
I shook my head. “No.”
Julie kicked off her shoes and curled her legs up on the couch. “I guess I get that.”
“You guess?”
“Yeah. I mean, it would be hard to explain, and hard to get anyone to listen to you. A blurry white head in a window. What the hell is that, anyway? I love Thomas, I do, but after what you told me about the FBI coming to visit, maybe keeping a low profile is a smart thing.” She knocked back the rest of her wine. “More?”
I nodded.
She hopped off the couch, opened another bottle, and brought it back. She refilled her glass and mine.
“There was something in your voice when you called me this afternoon,” Julie said. “You sounded kind of, I don’t know, shaky.”
I let the wine surround my tongue a few seconds before answering. “I was having a moment of self-pity, I guess. Thinking about my dad, about Thomas. It was all getting me down at the moment. Look, I don’t want to burden you with all this shit.”
“It’s okay,” she said. No one spoke for a few seconds. Then, “I remember you in school, how you were always drawing things. Sometimes I’d see you, sitting on the floor in the hall, leaning up against your locker, a hundred kids shuffling around you and yelling and goofing around and slamming their lockers, and you’d be sketching something in your book, totally oblivious to everything that was going on around you. I’m like, always looking around at what’s going on, but there you were, in your own world, doing your thing.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess.”
“I think you and Thomas are more alike than you might think. He’s wrapped up in his world, but I can picture you, back in Burlington, up in your studio all by yourself, just you and your airbrush or your pencil or your CAD program, letting out some image, some picture that’s been trapped in your head, setting it free.” She had some more wine. “I think I’m starting to feel this a little.”
I was, too, but not so much that my mind wasn’t still racing. “I keep thinking about how Dad died. The key in the OFF position, the blades-”
Julie put a finger on my lips. “Shh,” she said. “What was it you told Thomas? Let it go. Let it all go, just for a while.”
Julie put our glasses on the coffee table and snuggled in closer to me. I slipped my arms around her and placed my mouth on hers. This went on for a while until Julie said, “This ain’t high school anymore. We don’t have to stay on the couch.”
“Upstairs,” I said.
“I was thinking my place,” she said, clearly a reference to Thomas clicking away upstairs.
“He won’t be coming out of his room. Sometime around midnight, or later, he’ll hit the bathroom and brush his teeth and pack it in. We’re not going to see him before that.”
So we slipped upstairs. I steered Julie into the bedroom at the end of the hall, and over to the queen-sized bed my father had slept in, alone-so far as I knew-since my mother’s passing.
“Isn’t this your dad’s room?” Julie asked.
“This is where I’ve been sleeping. Would you like to go out to the car, like last time?”
She gave me a look. “No, this’ll do.”
I barely had the door closed when Julie started unbuttoning my shirt. I slid my hands under her sweater and felt her warm skin under my palms. My mouth was on hers as we moved to the bed. Julie pushed me onto my back and straddled me, reaching down and unbuckling my belt.
“I know some excellent stress reduction techniques,” she said, swinging her legs back off me so she could slide off my jeans and boxers. She tossed them onto the floor, got back on top, crossed her arms to the opposite sides, and whisked her top off in one swift motion, exposing a lacy, purple bra. She gave her head a shake to get her hair back into place.
“Purple?” I said. “Is that the same-”
“Oh please. I was a skinny, 110-pound school brat.”
“Just asking.”
