Sheffer was late, as usual. Why was one o’clock always 1:10 or 1:15 with that woman? Why was 11 A.M. always 11:20, with some excuse attached?
Okay, cool your jets, Birdsey, I told myself. You bite her head off as soon as she walks in the door, you won’t get what you need.
Get him tested. . . . Keep my name out of it.
Drinkwater’s phone call had kept me up all night. Just my brother’s paranoid delusions—right, Sheffer? He’s “perfectly safe” all right. Except for one minor detail: he might be infected. Someone down here at this fucking place might have given him AIDS.
I’ll take care of him for you, Ma. I promise. You can go now, Ma. . . .
Face it, Birdsey: you were asleep at the wheel. You let them lull you. Cut back your visits, stopped calling to check on him. . . . And when you did visit, you only half-listened to his horror stories: how they were poisoning him, programming him, coming into his cell in the middle of the night. . . . Oh Jesus, don’t let him have HIV on top of everything else. Don’t let that test be positive. . . .
I knew one thing: I was getting him examined independently, whether they liked it or not. I didn’t trust any of these clowns anymore. I wasn’t taking anyone’s word.
Okay, chill out. Think about something else. . . . I reached over, snagged the newspaper on Sheffer’s desk.
POST–GULF WAR OIL PRICES DROPPING. . . . How can we kill people for the sake of cheap oil, Dominick? How can we justify that? . . . king beating: tapes show l.a.p.d. “levity.” . . . He’s safe here, Dominick. Unit Two’s the best. Sheffer had said it so often, so convincingly, that I’d bought the line. And now look what had happened.
What might have happened, I reminded myself. His test could come back negative.
I saw my sorry-ass reflection in Sheffer’s computer monitor. Saw, whether I liked it or not, my grandfather. . . . Why the hell had I picked up Domenico’s history the night before—read the one goddamned thing guaranteed to extend my insomnia—make me feel even worse? . . . A painter vomits and shits himself to death, a rabbit gets hacked in half and doubles itself. . . . So your wife and her friend were fugitives, Old Man? My grandmother was a murderer? Is that what’s wrong with us?
And what about his other suspicion—that Ma was really the Irishman’s daughter? If that was true, then Domenico wasn’t even my grandfather, right? Mine or Thomas’s. We beat the rap. . . . Only it didn’t wash. How could she have given birth to twins with different fathers? If I wasn’t his grandson, why had I grown to look like those sepia-tinted pictures of him—those pictures Ma had gone back into the burning house to save?
One thing was coming clear: the reason why he’d treated Ma like crap. “Rabbit-face,” “cracked jug”: if you disowned your own daughter—convinced yourself she was somebody else’s—then you could make her your personal whipping girl, right? Punish her for her mother’s sins. . . . Right, Old Man? Was that why you went down to that store where she worked and made her eat a cigarette? Shoved her face into a plate of fried eggs? . . . My guess was that “Papa” had shoved his daughter around plenty. He’d beaten his wife, hadn’t he? His own mother back in Sicily? Why would he have spared a harelipped daughter he didn’t even claim?
No wonder Ma was afraid of her own shadow. No wonder she’d never been able to stand up to Ray. . . . She’d let history repeat itself when she married Ray Birdsey, that much was clear. I tell you one thing, buddy boy! If you were my flesh and blood . . . No kid of mine would ever . . . That prick had spent a lifetime disclaiming us.
BOMBING OF IRAQ “NEAR-APOCALYPTIC.” “A United Nations report says the U.S.–led allied bombing campaign had wrought ‘near-apocalyptic’ results upon the infrastructure of what had been, until January of 1991, a rather highly urbanized and mechanized society. Now, most means of modern life support have been destroyed or rendered tenuous. Iraq has been relegated to a preindustrial age, but with all the disabilities of postindustrial dependency on an intensive use of energy and technology. In terms of human casualties . . .”
Desert Storm, Rodney King: the front page told the same old story, over and over and over. Might made right—whoever had the “smart” bombs, the billy clubs. . . . Duck and cover, Thomas! You want mercy? Forget about God. God’s a picture from the five-and-ten hanging up on Ma’s bedroom wall. Pray to the oppressor, man. . . . I’m sorry, Ray. I won’t do it again. I’m sorry. . . . The never-ending soundtrack from Hollyhock Avenue. The both of them over there—my mother, my brother—crying and begging the tyrant for mercy. . . . HEAVY RAINS EXPECTED THROUGH WEEKEND. . . .
Well, I tell you what, Ma: I may have been asleep at the wheel for the past couple of months, but I’m wide awake now. I’m getting him out of here if I have to drive up to Hartford and pound on the governor’s front door. If I have to torch this fucking place.
SINGER ERIC CLAPTON’S SON, 4, DIES IN FALL. . . .
Sheffer’s door swung open. “Hey, paisano. Sorry I’m late,” she said. “You wouldn’t believe the day I’ve had. First thing this morning, my daughter says—”
I held up my hand to shut her up. “I want my brother tested for HIV,” I said.
She stopped in her tracks. “Any, uh . . . any particular reason?”
I’d promised Drinkwater three times during our five-minute phone conversation the night before that I’d keep his name out of it. So I shrugged back at her. Just to be on the safe side, I said. Whenever I visited Thomas, he complained about sexual assaults.
“We’ve gone over all this,” she said. “Remember? Those are delusions. Homosexual panics.” She sat down at her desk. “When he starts off on that track, the best way to handle him is—”
“I don’t want him handled,” I said. “I want him tested.”
“The wards are monitored day and night, Dominick. If there’s any prison rape going on, it’s in his head. Let it go.”
I told her I could make the request through Dr. Chase if she preferred. Or through her supervisor. What was her name again?
“Dr. Farber,” Sheffer said. She and Farber had a meeting scheduled for later that afternoon. If I really insisted, she could broach the subject with her then—let me know in the next couple of days what Farber had said.
“If the meeting’s this afternoon, why can’t you let me know later this afternoon?”
She clenched up a little. They had just added three new patients to her caseload, she said; her monthlies were two days overdue; her daughter had woken up that morning with an ear infection. If she could get back to me later that day, she would do that. If she couldn’t, I would just have to wait. She was dancing as fast as she could. “And anyway,” she said, “I already know what Dr. Farber’s going to say. If they started letting patients’ families call the shots on medical testing, it would open up the floodgates.”
My brain ricocheted like a pinball; I was forming the idea as I spoke. “You been . . . you been following that mess out in Los Angeles, Sheffer? The way the cops beat that black guy to a pulp out there? . . . You seen the videotape of that?”
“Yeah,” she said. I watched her try to figure out where I was going.
“Pretty brutal, huh? Man, they savaged that guy.” My adrenaline was pumping; my sneakers were tapping against the floor, a thousand beats a minute. “Public’s probably not in much of a mood to tolerate brutality-in-uniform right now, huh?”
She waited.
“Remember . . . you remember that night last October when they checked my brother in down here? The way that guard roughed me up? You witnessed that, didn’t you? Popped your head out the door right in the middle of things?”
Sheffer’s face looked neutral—official. She neither confirmed nor denied.
“I followed your advice, by the way. Remember? You told me to have myself examined. And I did. Went down to the clinic. Had them take pictures and everything. That was good advice you gave me, Sheffer. To get things documented. Get proof.”
She glanced up at the intercom on her wall. “What’s your point?” she said.
“I just made my point, paisana,” I said. “Tell Dr. Farber I want Thomas tested.”
At about five that afternoon, I received a call from the office of Dr. Richard Hume. Hume was Farber’s supervisor’s supervisor, if I had the food chain right. It was Hume who’d chaired the Security Board hearing that had sentenced my brother. His secretary asked me if I’d please hold. You had to love the power boys: they called you, then made you sit and wait for the privilege of talking to them.
When Hume came on the line, he chatted with me like we were a couple of cronies down at the Elks Lodge. He was glad I’d raised my concern with Ms. Sheffer, he said. Inmates’ families were an integral part of the treatment team at Hatch; it was right there in black and white in the hospital’s mission statement. His feeling on this particular request, however—my request for an HIV test for my brother—was that it was unwarranted at this particular point in time. The Institute tested patients periodically, but on their own schedule. Dr. Hume said he hoped I could see things from the hospital’s position: that it was neither cost-effective nor a wise precedent for the administration to—”
“I’ll pay for it,” I said. “I want it done by someone who’s not in-house, anyway. Not on the payroll down there. I’ll make all the arrangements and pick up the tab. Just tell me when I can bring someone in.”
Dr. Hume said I didn’t understand. If they allowed patients’ families to dictate medical testing schedules, it could become a procedural nightmare. Thomas had been tested when he entered the hospital last October, he said. His next test would be—”
“Who’s your boss?” I said.
There was a pause on the other end. “Excuse me?”
“Who do you answer to? Because I ain’t going away. Me or my pictures.”
There was a pause. “Which pictures are those, Mr. Birdsey?”
I couldn’t tell if he was in the dark about what I’d told Sheffer or just pretending he was. Couldn’t second-guess what Sheffer might have passed on. But I decided to go for broke. “The photographs of my black-and-blue groin,” I said. “My scrotum swollen up like a basketball. One of your goons down there roughed me up the night I checked my brother in. Kneed me a couple of good ones south of the equator. ‘Rodney Kinged’ me a little, I guess you could say. In front of witnesses.”
I hadn’t thought any of this out yet—had just leapt without a net. But I was in it now. We were all in it—Sheffer, this talking head on the phone, my brother and me. “Got myself examined the day after it happened,” I said. “I wanted everything documented, you know what I’m saying? And now, Jesus, with all this stuff out there in L.A. The way people are feeling right now. . . . I just . . . I kind of figured you might want to okay that test for my brother. Spare yourself Excedrin headache number seven, you know?”
No comment on the other end.
“I mean, how’s one little test going to cause any ‘procedural nightmares,’ right? If everything checks out okay, I just go away. Me and my complaint.”
Hume asked me if there was any particular reason why I felt an HIV test might be warranted. Drinkwater’s face flashed before me. Keep my name out of it.
“My brother talks all the time about guys breaking into his cell at night,” I said. “It’s probably his paranoia—I realize that. I just want to—what do you call it?—err on the side of caution. Don’t you?”
I waited out his big speech about State of Connecticut policy and Hatch’s unswerving concern for patients’ well-being. Thanked him for the call. Told him I’d be contacting my attorney.
There was dead air for several seconds. “Well, you do what you have to do, Mr. Birdsey,” he finally said. “And we’ll do the same. Because unless I’m reading you incorrectly, what you’re doing here is attempting to bribe me. And if you think—”
“Hey, look, Big Shot,” I said. “All I’m trying to do is defend a guy who can’t defend himself. A guy who doesn’t belong anywhere near that happy little funhouse you run down there. All I want to do is make sure no one down there has been butt-fucking my brother.”
He hung up in my ear.
I stood there, my heart pounding like a son of a bitch. Goddamn it, Birdsey! That was exactly the way not to—I lobbed the fucking phone across the room. Watched it bounce against the refrigerator door and clatter back across the floor. Land at my feet.
Well, asshole, I told myself. You just did something. For better or worse, you just put something in motion.
A couple of beers later, Hume’s secretary called back. The test I’d requested for my brother had been scheduled for Monday afternoon of the following week. Thomas’s physical would be conducted by hospital personnel, his blood screened by a representative of the Haynes Pathobiology Laboratory.
I tried to think past the beer buzz I’d started. Hume was doing an about-face? Giving me a reasonable facsimile of what I wanted? The victory spooked me. “Why’d he change his mind?” I said.
The secretary said she knew nothing about it; she was merely passing along a message from “the boss.”
“Then put ‘the boss’ back on,” I said. “I’ll ask him myself.”
A minute or more later, she came back on the line. Dr. Hume had stepped away from his desk, she said. When I told her I’d hold until he “stepped back,” it was, oh, wait a minute. His attaché case wasn’t there. He must have already left for the day.
“Then give him a message,” I said. “Tell him I’m bringing my own doctor for my brother’s test.”
Why had he caved in? Was he running scared about something? I’d go over to the clinic first thing in the morning—try and talk to that Chinese doctor, Dr. Yup—the one who’d had friends killed in Tiananmen Square. She’d called what that guard had done to me “oppression.” I wanted Dr. Yup to examine my brother.
Sheffer called the next afternoon, sounding shell-shocked. “Dominick?” she said. “Can you meet me later on today? Something’s come up.”
“Is he hurt?” I said. “Did someone hurt him?”
Uh-uh, she said; there was no new incident. But when I told her I could be down at Hatch in half an hour, she hesitated. Asked me if we could meet someplace else—someplace outside of Three Rivers, maybe. Her shift was over at four-thirty, she said. How about that little coffee place up across from the university? The Sugar Shack—did I know where that was? She could get there by, say, five-fifteen?
Why was she suggesting someplace a half-hour drive away? I told her I’d be there. Asked her again if my brother was all right.
Nothing bad had happened to him that day, she said. Beyond that, she wasn’t sure of anything anymore. She’d explain when she got there.
The coffee I’d bought her when I got to the doughnut shop was stone cold by the time she finally walked in. She sat and gulped it anyway. She looked like hell.
“How’s your daughter?” I said.
Her eyes narrowed. “Jesse? Why? What do you mean?”
“Her ear infection?”
“Oh. Better. The doctor put her on Amoxicillin. Thanks for asking.” She fished out a pack of cigarettes. “Can you smoke here?” she said. “Is that a sin at this place?” I pushed the little tinfoil ashtray over to her side of the table.
I told her I was pretty sure I knew what she was going to tell me—that I’d figured it out on the drive up there. “He’s positive, right? They got nervous and jumped the gun on the test. He’s got it.”
She shook her head. I was right about their jumping the gun, she said; they’d done blood work on Thomas that afternoon. But the results weren’t in yet. They wouldn’t know anything until Monday morning.
“So they’ll already have the results by the time he’s examined officially. Right?”
She nodded. Picked up her coffee cup and started shredding it. “Dominick?” she said. “What I’m going to tell you may not even be about Thomas, okay? Not directly, anyway. And maybe not even indirectly. Just remember that.” Her face contorted a little, the same way Dessa’s did when she was struggling not to cry. She took a long drag off her cigarette. Exhaled. It was killing me, but I sat there and waited. Kept my mouth shut for once in my life.
She asked me if I recalled a conversation we had had several months back about one of the psych aides down at Hatch—a guy named Duane Taylor. I’d commented about him the day I’d stood at her office window and watched Thomas out on recreation break. It was before my security clearance had come through—before I’d won the right to visit my brother face-to-face. Did I remember?
I saw Thomas standing out in that rec area, waiting to get his cigarette lit while Duane Taylor entertained his pets. Ignored my brother’s existence. “Dude with the cowboy hat, right?” I said. Sheffer nodded.
There’d been an assault at Hatch a week ago, she said. On the night shift. The administration had kept it so hushed up that most of the staff hadn’t even heard about it. “Which is pretty impressive, given our grapevine,” she said. “But this was top secret.”
“Who got assaulted?” I said.
“Duane Taylor. He was attacked from behind in the men’s bathroom in Unit Four—garroted with a wire and left for dead.”
I waited. Sheffer looked up—met my eyes. “Taylor works days,” she said.
He’d been rushed to Shanley Memorial and then helicoptered to Hartford Hospital. It had been touch and go for several days, but things were starting to look better for him. They weren’t sure yet about permanent damage: oxygen deprivation to the brain.
She took another drag. Gave her cigarette a dirty look and stubbed it out, half smoked. “I gave these things up on Jesse’s last birthday,” she said. “She wanted two things: for us to go to Disney World and for me to stop smoking. I couldn’t exactly swing the Magic Kingdom, so I got her a Carvel cake and a Rainbow Brite doll and let her flush my cigarettes down the toilet to the tune of ‘Happy Birthday.’ A whole carton of them. And now, tonight, I’m going to go pick her up smelling like cigarettes.” She started to cry, then stopped herself with a laugh, a shrug. “Oh, well, my credibility’s shot to hell, anyway. Right?”
“Did my brother assault the cowboy? Is that what you’re telling me?”
She shook her head. “Oh, god, no, Dominick. Is that what you . . . ? No.”
The guy who’d strangled Taylor confessed that same night, she said. A patient in one of the other units—she couldn’t tell me his name. It was probably all going to come out in the papers, anyway, though. Unless the hospital could keep it hushed up, there was going to be so much garbage flying around, people would have to duck. The “official version” of Taylor’s assault—the one the administration was now circulating—was that the vendetta had started over a pint of tequila. Taylor and a friend of his—a guard named Edward Morrison—had apparently been running a black market business. Alcohol and cigarettes. Pills. “That much the hospital’s willing to cop to,” Sheffer said. “According to the version the hospital’s floating, Taylor had collected money for the tequila and then reneged. But it wasn’t about booze. It was about sex. . . . Well, power. Rape.”
The word made me tense up. “What’s this got to do with Thomas?” I said.
She rested her chin against her propped-up hand. Looked at me with defeated eyes. “Hopefully, nothing,” she said. “From what I heard today, it was mostly the younger kids that Taylor went after—guys in their twenties. But I don’t really know the whole story yet, Dominick. I don’t think I know anything anymore.” For the next several seconds, we sat there, saying nothing, Sheffer’s cigarette smoke swirling around us.
“Let me ask you something,” she said. “How many times over the past several months would you estimate I’ve reassured you about your brother’s safety? Twenty-five times, maybe? Thirty? Now multiply that number by my caseload. Twenty-five or thirty reassurances times forty prisoners’ families. . . . God, I just can’t believe how naive I’ve been. How stupid.” She thrust her tiny, shaking hand across the table. Grabbed my hand and shook it. “How do you do?” she said. “I’m Lisa of Sunnybrook Farm.”
She drew cigarette after cigarette out of her pack—snapped each in half, throwing the refuse into her mangled coffee cup. “Guess what else I found out today?” she said. “Through the grapevine, of course—not through our ever-responsible leadership. I found out that as much as a quarter of the population at Hatch may be HIV-positive. That we’ve got an epidemic down there, Dominick, and the administration’s just been looking the other way. Sitting on the statistics. Can’t have any bad PR now, can we?”
Dr. Yup accompanied me to Hatch on Monday afternoon, examined my brother, and drew blood samples which she transported personally to the testing lab her clinic used. The results of both the hospital’s and Dr. Yup’s tests were the same: Thomas was HIV-negative. But Dr. Yup’s report also cited the presence of anal warts, contusions, and other indicators of rectal penetration.
As a result, my brother was wanted for questioning in the ongoing state police investigation of Duane Taylor and Edward Morrison. I asked to be in attendance during these interviews and was, at first, denied. But Thomas dug his heels in and insisted to both the police and the hospital administration that he would speak to no one unless his brother was there. The cops met his condition. During the four interviews that followed, I sat by Thomas’s side.
This was weird: one of his inquisitors—the head of the investigation, actually—was State Police Captain Ronald Avery. I recognized him immediately: one of the two cops who’d caught Leo and me smoking reefer out by the trestle bridge that night and hauled us in for questioning. Avery had been young back then—dark-haired and lean, probably not even thirty. He’d been the most decent of the three cops who’d grilled us that night. Now his hair was gray, his body droopy. Looked like he was maybe four or five years away from retirement. But he’d held onto his decency—his sense of fair play. He was patient with Thomas throughout the interviews—as nonthreatening as possible, given what the cops needed to find out.
Thomas’s account of his involvement with Morrison and Taylor kept changing. Morrison had assaulted him but Taylor never had, my brother said. Then he claimed both had. Then, neither. During the last interview, Thomas insisted that Taylor had smuggled him out of Hatch one night and flown him in secret to Washington, D.C., for a meeting with the CIA. Vice President and Mrs. Quayle had attended. The Quayles had been involved in Taylor’s cover-up from the beginning and were also behind the lacing of Sudafed with cyanide that had killed those people out in Seattle. Now that he was letting that cat out of the bag, Thomas told Captain Avery, he was probably a walking dead man.
As I sat there listening to Thomas, exchanging looks with Avery and Dr. Chase, the hospital liaison, I thought about something Dr. Patel had said several months before. Two brothers are lost in the woods. One of them may be lost forever.
But lost or not, Thomas could still walk. Could still be sprung from Hatch.
The second unexpected phone call I received from Ralph Drinkwater came a few weeks before the story about Morrison and Taylor hit the papers. “I have something for you,” he told me. “Something you might be able to use.”
“Use how?” I said.
“That’s up to you. Just keep my name out of it. You coming to see him in the next couple days?”
I told him I could get down there by midafternoon the next day.
“That works,” he said. He told me I should park at the far end of the visitors’ lot. Leave my car unlocked.
What was this—Watergate? Drinkwater as Deep Throat? Why was he doing this?
After my visit with Thomas the next afternoon, I got back in the Escort. Looked in the glove compartment, under the seats. Nothing. But on the drive home, I thought of the sun visor. And when I flipped it down, a piece of paper fell into my lap: a memo from Dr. Richard Hume to a Dr. Hervé Garcia, stamped “Confidential.”
He was a cynical bastard, Hume. That much was obvious. Whatever his reasons had been for entering the healing profession, he’d lost his way in the woods, too. In the memo, he advised Garcia against Hatch’s “trumpeting these numbers to Hartford” but asked, rhetorically, whether “John and Joan Q. Public” wouldn’t silently approve of the HIV stats if they ever were released—the “weeding out of the population,” courtesy of AIDS.
Social Darwinism, I thought. Mr. LoPresto rides again. Jesus. I was beginning to understand, I thought, how Drinkwater fit into all this. Future casino millionaire or not, Ralph still needed to take a whack at the oppressor. He was still looking for justice.
Well, for whatever reason Ralph had stuck that stolen memo under my visor, I had him now: Hume. If I played it right, that confiscated memo was the key that could spring the lock. Get my brother out of there. La chiave, I thought. Here it is, Ma. This is what we’ve been waiting for.
The first two attorneys I talked to declined to represent me on ethical grounds. The third one didn’t seem to understand what I needed. “We’ll sue as a group,” he said. “The families of the infected inmates. They might pay millions to make this go away.”
“My brother’s not infected,” I reminded him.
He nodded. I’d be an “unofficial” member of the families’ group, he said. A silent partner. The terms could be discreetly hammered out beforehand. He wouldn’t be representing me per se, but because I’d provided the memo, he’d make sure I ended up sitting just as pretty as the rest of them.
I stood up, shaking my head. “You know something?” I said. “You’re like every sleazy lawyer joke I ever heard rolled into one. Go fuck yourself.” For emphasis, I kicked his wastebasket on the way out of there, sent his trash flying every which way but loose.
“Constantine Motors. Leo Blood speaking. How may I help you?”
I asked him if he still had that fancy suit of his.
“My Armani? I’m wearing it as we speak, Mr. Birdseed. Why do you ask?”
“Because I need an actor in a fancy suit.”
He was resistant at first: Leo, who had taken stupid risks his whole life. Who’d thrived on asshole stunts like the one I was proposing. It was illegal, wasn’t it? Posing as an attorney? What if this Dr. Hume recognized his picture from the car ads?
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Like you’re some big celebrity.”
“Well, what about Gene? If he ever found out about a bag job like this, he’d fire my ass on the spot, son-in-law or no son-in-law.”
“Best thing that could happen to you,” I said. “Come on, Leo. You don’t have to say you’re an attorney; you just have to imply you’re one. This is the role of a lifetime.”
“I don’t know, Dominick. I’d like to help you out, but—”
“Look, I need you, man,” I said. “Tommy needs you. This is our only shot.”
It was the first day of April when we finally “communicated directly” with Hume. I’d made three appointments by then; his secretary had called at the last minute and canceled every one of them. “Fuck it,” Leo said after he stood us up the third time. “Let’s ambush the prick.” By then, I think he’d convinced himself he had passed the bar exam.
We waited across the highway from the state hospital’s main entrance. “I just hope it doesn’t backfire on Thomas,” I said.
Life had backfired on Thomas, Leo reminded me. All we were trying to do was start a little forward motion for the guy.
When Hume’s silver Mercedes left the grounds, I started the car, pulled into traffic behind him. Tailed the lead-footed bastard down the John Mason Parkway, onto 395, and then to I-95. “This asshole related to the Andrettis or something?” Leo said.
“I just hope we’re not making a mistake,” I said.
Leo told me to stop thinking and just follow the bastard.
Hume exited the highway in Old Saybrook, drove along Route 1 for a couple of miles, and then pulled into the parking lot of some little seafood restaurant. Soon as he got out of the car, the doors of a red Cherokee parked a couple of cars away swung open. A young couple approached Hume—early twenties, maybe. The girl was a dead ringer—had to be his daughter. There were hugs and kisses, a slap on the back for what looked like the boyfriend. “So how’s Yale treating you two?” I heard Hume ask.
I told Leo this was a bad idea—that we should just go. We could catch up with him at Hatch. He couldn’t keep canceling appointments.
“Look, Dominick,” Leo said. “I been wearing this stupid suit to work three days in a row now. Even I’m getting sick of it. Come on. It’s showtime.”
Briefcase in one hand, the other outstretched toward Hume, Leo led the way. “Dr. Hume? Excuse me, sir. If we could have a minute?” He introduced himself as Arthur verSteeg. Pumped Hume’s daughter’s hand, the boyfriend’s. “Arthur verSteeg. Pleasure to meet you. Arthur verSteeg. And this is my friend Dominick Birdsey.”
That was when the smile dropped off of Hume’s face. He told the two Yalies to go inside and order him a Glenlivet on the rocks.
He stood there, scanning the memo for a couple of seconds, scowling. Then he ripped it up. Sent the pieces fluttering into the breeze coming off Long Island Sound.
“Go ahead, there, Doctor,” Leo said. “Do your thing. We got plenty of copies.”
“What is it you’re after?” Hume said. “Money?”
“Justice,” I said. “The only thing I want from you is—”
Attorney verSteeg cut me off. “Why don’t you let me handle this, Mr. Birdsey?”
On April 11, 1991, the Psychiatric Security Review Board, meeting in executive session, reversed its decision of the previous October and transferred Thomas to the custody of his family, effective at once. The Board strongly advised, however, that Thomas be placed immediately in a fully staffed, fully secured nonforensic psychiatric hospital.
“Well, congratulations,” Sheffer said, shaking my hand in the hallway outside the conference room. “I don’t know how you did it—and hey, I don’t want to know how—but it worked. You got him out of here.”
I nodded, not smiling. “Be careful what you wish for. Right?”
Sheffer warned me that after six months in maximum security, freedom was going to be a shock to my brother’s system. That as tough as it had been for him at Hatch, there had been a kind of safety in all that surveillance, regimentation, and predictability. He was apt to feel unmoored, unsafe—too free. And it had happened so abruptly; she’d never seen such expediency. There’d been no time to prepare Thomas, emotionally, for his release.
Or to get him placed.
She was doing some “fancy footwork,” she said. Settle, Thomas’s old stomping ground, was out of the question. With the facility definitely closing later that year, they weren’t admitting any new patients. They were transferring people out of Settle. No exceptions. Her second choice, Middletown, was still a possibility. She had a call in to admissions there; she’d try to get me an answer by the end of the day. All of them, she said—she, Dr. Chase, Dr. Patel, the nurses—advised against Thomas’s staying with me. It just wasn’t safe, she said.
“Hey, my cooking’s not that bad,” I told her.
Sheffer didn’t return my smile. “Dominick, I’m going to say something to you that you’re probably not going to appreciate. But I’ll say it anyway.”
“Now there’s a surprise,” I told her.
“You’re arrogant, Dominick. You’re a real good guy and everything. I know you’re trying hard to do what’s best for him. But . . . well, I just hope your arrogance doesn’t end up putting him at risk. Just be careful.”
It was arrogant for a guy to want to keep his brother safe? If I hadn’t managed a little arrogance, he’d still be stuck down there indefinitely. But I didn’t want to get into it with her—it wasn’t the time or the place. So I smiled, thanked her for all she’d done. Hugged her back when she held out her arms to me.
If Sheffer thought I was arrogant, she ought to read that thing of my grandfather’s.
When I walked with Thomas through Hatch’s front security gate and out into the sunlight, he stopped at the top of the stairs and squinted. Looked up at the sky, the swaying trees. He moved a step or two closer. Slipped his stump into the pocket of his jacket.
“Well,” I said, “you’re a free man.”
“I’m a walking target,” he said.
Dr. Chase had changed his medication the week before the hearing—some new psycholeptic the FDA had just approved. If there was going to be any improvement, it would take a couple more weeks to kick in. But I was hoping to avoid having to hear who was after Thomas now—hoping to savor one afternoon’s worth of victory. It was only later that I realized how scared he must have been walking out of there—how terrifying all that sudden open space would be to someone who saw the enemy behind every tree, every steering wheel.
“You want to go over to my place and watch some TV?” I said. “Stop over and see Ray? . . . You hungry? Want to get something at McDonald’s or someplace?”
He wanted to go to the Falls, he said.
“The Falls? . . . Yeah, all right. Sure. You’re a free man now. You can do whatever you damn want to. We got the whole afternoon to celebrate.”
“Celebrate what?” he said.
He snickered. Mumbled something I didn’t catch.
“What’d you say?”
But he didn’t answer me.
I pulled into the little six-car lot adjacent to the Indian cemetery. Together, we passed the graves on the way to the path that led up to the Falls.
“Remember her?” Thomas asked. He had stopped—was pointing at Penny Ann Drinkwater’s small stone.
I nodded. Saw Penny Ann’s body going over the Falls, the way it had in my nightmares. Saw Eric Clapton’s son dropping from the sky like Icarus. . . .
“You, uh . . . you seen much of her brother while you were down there?”
“Who?”
“Ralph Drinkwater. Her brother.” The guy that got you out of there, I thought. The guy who gave me the ammunition I needed to make you safe again. “He’s on the maintenance crew. Remember? You told me you saw him once down there.”
“Down where?”
“At Hatch.”
He looked over at me. Looked me in the eye. “We’re cousins,” he said.
What was he talking about? “We’re brothers, man.”
“Her cousins,” he said. He nodded toward Penny Ann’s gravestone.
“Yeah, whatever,” I said. “Come on. Let’s go check out the river.”
We trudged up the dirt-packed path at the far end of the graveyard. It was a muddy mess from that two-day deluge we’d had. Thomas was out of shape—winded from the sloping incline. A breeze tossed the boughs of the pine trees, the bare branches of the pin oaks. My emotions were all over the place.
When we got to the mountain laurel grove, I told Thomas something I’d never told anyone before, not even Dessa: that we were standing at my favorite spot. “Another couple of months and these bushes’ll explode with flowers,” I said. “Early June, it happens. I’ll bring you back here. I come out every year.”
Thomas told me that mountain laurel leaves were poisonous. Had he mentioned that there’d been several attempts to poison him while he was at Hatch? He was pretty sure the Republicans were behind it.
I didn’t answer him. Some celebration, I thought. Started hiking again toward the sound of spilling water.
When we got to the clearing—the waterspill—we stood there, side by side, watching the river drop over the edge and down. It was roaring something fierce that day—spring thaw, plus all that rain we’d had. I looked over at Thomas, studied his grooved, joyless face. It showed, out there in the sunlight: all the wear and tear of the past six months, the twenty-odd years before that. He looked older than forty-one. Old. Part of me was scared to death about what the next weeks and months were going to entail. But another part of me was happy, in partial disbelief, still. He’s here, I remember thinking. He’s with me, Ma. I got him out of there.
And now what?
Turning to me, Thomas said something I couldn’t hear over the roar of the water. I cupped my hand against my ear and leaned closer. “What?”
“I said, this is a holy place.”
I nodded. Stiffened a little. The Holy Roller rides again, I thought. But as I looked into his eyes, I felt my annoyance turning into something else. Pity, maybe? Relief? Love? I couldn’t say, exactly. I started to cry. Like I said, my emotions were all over the map.
Thomas asked me if I believed in God.
I didn’t answer him at first. Groped around for some response that wouldn’t trigger one of his Jesus speeches. Then I said something I hadn’t planned on at all.
“I wish I did.”
He took a step closer to me. Reached over and put his arm around me. In my peripheral vision, I could see his stump.
“The Lord Jesus Christ is your savior, Dominick,” he said. “Trust me. I enflesh the word of God.”
“You do, huh?” I said. “Well, whattaya know?” With the sleeve of my jacket, I wiped the tears out of my eyes. Took a step or two away from his embrace.
Neither of us said anything else for a while—two or three minutes, maybe. It was me who finally broke the silence. “Know what someone told me once?” I said. “That this river is life—that all it’s doing is flowing from the past into the future and passing us along the way. . . . Kind of puts things in perspective, doesn’t it?”
He kept looking at me. Said nothing.
“Hey, speaking of the past,” I said. “You know what I’ve been reading? Papa’s life story. Our grandfather. . . . He dictated this whole long thing before he died. In Italian. I had it translated. . . . Ma gave it to me. To both of us.”
“Papa,” Thomas repeated.
“You remember the way she’d go on and on about him? Papa this, Papa that. . . . Turns out, though, that he wasn’t quite the big superhero she made him out to be. He was, I don’t know . . . he was mean. Some of this stuff I’m reading is really—”
“Can we walk down to the water?” Thomas asked.
“What?” It miffed me a little, him interrupting me—not giving a shit about it.
He wanted to take his shoes and socks off, he said. Wade into the river.
The water was too cold right now, I said. I’d take him back there again when it got warmer and he could wade as much as he wanted. In June, maybe, when the mountain laurel came out. “Come on,” I said. “You hungry? I’m getting hungry.”
I’d planned just to grab some stuff at the drive-thru. Going out in public was something I figured I’d reintroduce him to gradually. And restaurants were always a wild card with Thomas—even before Hatch. But when we pulled into the parking lot at McDonald’s, who pulls in right behind us, honking, but Leo. He jabbed his finger, pointing to the parking space next to his.
Leo talked too loud. Shook Thomas’s hand a little too vigorously. He insisted we join him inside—that we let him treat us both to lunch. Since our victory against Dr. Hume, Leo had begun calling himself Victor Sifuentes, after that guy on L.A. Law. Righter of legal wrongs in his designer suits. He didn’t really get it; it was all play-acting for Leo. But this was partly his celebration, too, I thought. So we went inside.
The whole friggin’ place was decorated in Little Mermaid. The bright lights and colors, the jostling into the crowded line: it made my brother edgy. He kept squinting, blinking his eyes. At the register, Leo and I gave the woman our orders and I turned to Thomas. “You know what you want?” I asked him. He just kept staring up at the menu board, dazed.
“He’ll have a Big Mac and a shake,” I told the cashier. “What kind of shake you want, Thomas? Chocolate?”
He said he wanted a Happy Meal.
“Thomas,” I said. “Those things are just for little kids.”
“Oh, that’s okay,” the counter woman butted in. “He can get one if he wants. Anyone can buy them.”
I told her thanks, but he didn’t want one.
“Yes, I do,” he insisted.
“Come on, Birdsey,” Leo said. “If my man here wants a Happy Meal, then that’s what I’m buying him. What kind you want, Thomas? They got hamburger, cheeseburger, McNuggets.”
“McNuggets,” Thomas said. “And black coffee for my drink.”
The cashier told us Happy Meals didn’t come with coffee. Just soda or milk.
“Get him a coffee if he wants a coffee,” Leo told her. “Charge me extra for it.”
When she went to get our stuff, Leo recited lines from some movie: something about a chicken salad sandwich, hold the bread, hold the chicken between your legs. Shut up, I felt like telling him. It had been a mistake to come here. I’d wanted to take things slow, keep everything nice and simple. I felt scared. Felt like screaming at someone.
“I have to go to the bathroom,” Thomas said.
“Oh. Okay. I’ll go with you,” I said. “Leo can get our stuff.”
Thomas said I didn’t need to go with him.
“I know I don’t,” I said. “I have to go, too, okay? You mind?”
He complicated things, of course: locked himself in a stall for about ten minutes. Made me stand there, a nervous wreck, calling to him every thirty seconds or so. “You all right? . . . You still alive in there?” Guys kept going in and out, sneaking looks. I felt just like I’d felt on that school field trip when he’d locked himself in the bus toilet. Felt what I’d felt that first year in college, in our dorm: Thomas and Dominick, the Birdsey weirdos.
“Jesus, I thought maybe you fell in or something,” Leo said. He’d picked out a booth by the front window, but Thomas balked. Said he’d be a sitting duck in that spot.
“Stop it,” I told him. “Just sit down. No one’s after you.” He scoffed at that.
Leo started getting up, gathering our stuff together. “Sit down,” I said. “This seat’s fine. He’s got to—”
“What’s the big deal?” Leo said. “There’s a glare here anyway. Come on.”
When we were repositioned over by the restrooms, Thomas told Leo that he’d worked at this McDonald’s once.
“Not this one,” I said. “You worked at the other one—the one on Crescent Street.”
“No, I didn’t,” he said.
“Yes, you did.” You freaked out there, remember? You trashed the drive-thru speaker because aliens were calling to you. Remember?
“No, I didn’t,” he insisted. “I worked at this one.”
“All right, fine,” I said. “It was this one. I’m screwed up.”
Halfway through his meal, Thomas decided he had to go to the bathroom again. This time, I let him go himself.
“Listen,” I told Leo. “I know you meant well, but he’s got to be trained how to function normally in public. Someone who’s forty-one years old shouldn’t be getting a kiddie meal. Shouldn’t be allowed to play Hide-in-the-Back-of-the-Restaurant-Because-They’re-Out-to-Get-Me.”
Leo filled his mouth with fries. “Hey, you know what my daughter said to me the other day, Dominick?” he said. “ ‘Take a chill pill, Dad.’ And now let me pass on those words of wisdom to you, okay? Re-lax. Take a chill pill, man. He’s doing fine.”
“Yeah, right,” I said. I reached inside Thomas’s Happy Meal and pulled out his complimentary Little Mermaid figurine. Waved it in Leo’s face like evidence.
Thomas and I were sitting in my living room watching The People’s Court when Sheffer called. “Okay, I got him a placement,” she said. “It’s a little complicated, though. Middletown can take him, but they don’t have a bed until Friday.”
“All right,” I said. “He can stay here until Friday.”
Sheffer said she had a better idea. She’d called down at Hope House, one of Thomas’s old group homes. They’d agreed to bend the rules a little—take him for the interim. “They’re short-staffed, but I really feel it’s better than having him stay with you.”
“Why?”
“What are you going to do, Dominick—strap him into his bed? Stay up all night like a sentry?”
You go downstairs now, Dominick. This wouldn’t be any fun for you. Run up and tell us if Ray is coming. . . .
All right, I said. I didn’t really have a problem with him going to Hope House for a couple of days. For one thing, it was close. For another, he’d liked it down there once upon a time—had done better at that place than anywhere else.
I was already feeling a little over my head, I admitted to myself after I got off the phone. That stupid trip to McDonald’s had done a number on me. And if he was over at the group home, it’d give me time to get him some of the things he’d need for Middletown: new jeans, underwear, shampoo and shit. Maybe I’d get him some sneakers so’s he didn’t have to keep clomping around in those stupid wingtip shoes.
I made us some supper and then drove him over there. Checked him in. The nighttime superviser cataloged aloud the personal belongings Thomas had wanted to bring: “Shoes, Bible, religious book, other religious book . . .” Oblivious of the admission process, Thomas sat there thumbing through his old favorite: Lives of the Martyred Saints.
I left him watching TV in the rec room, slumped in a stuffed chair. On the wall above his head, a cloth banner proclaimed Hope Springs Eternal at HOPE HOUSE!
“See you tomorrow,” I said. Bent down and kissed the top of his head, for some reason. I went home, got about halfway through a beer, and started dozing. Slept the sleep of the dead. . . .
The telephone startled me awake.
Missing? . . . What did she mean, missing?
He had to have left the premises somewhere after 2:00 A.M., the woman said, which was when they’d done their last bed check. The police were on their way.
Ray was already awake when I called. I swung by the house and picked him up on my way down there. The director kept throwing her hands into the air, insisting that this was the kind of thing that resulted from underfunding. Before all the cutbacks, she said, things like this just plain didn’t happen.
Jerry Martineau was one of the cops who showed up. Ray and I gave them a list of the places where Thomas might have gone—places where he’d hidden in the past when his paranoia closed in. Martineau said he was optimistic. He’d only been missing for a couple of hours at most. In another fifteen, twenty minutes, the sun would be up in earnest—they’d be getting a nice, early start. They could probably get reinforcements by mid-morning, if necessary. He’d call in some off-duty guys if he had to. They’d find him for us.
I nodded back at Martineau—let him spoon-feed me a little optimism. But I knew Thomas was dead. Had felt his dead weight since I’d swung my legs out of bed after that phone call. It was like I was dragging around some dead part of myself.
Ray and I drove out to the Falls, parked at the Indian graveyard, and tramped up the path. It was my idea.
“Thomas? . . . Hey, Thomas! “ Over and over, we called his name into the thundering water, the fog that hovered over the river below.
Ray said something I couldn’t hear.
“What?”
“I said, let’s hike down there. Walk the bank. We can walk down as far as the footbridge, then cross over. Walk the other side back again.”
I shook my head. Realized I didn’t want to be the one to find him.
We walked back down the path, got back into the Escort. I was fishing through my pockets, trying to find my keys, when Ray started up.
“I know I rode him too hard when he was a kid,” Ray said. “I know I did.” His eyes were panicky, pleading. “But she namby-pambied him all the time; I was just trying to toughen him for the world.” He threw open the door and got out again. Circled around and around the car. “Jesus,” he kept mumbling. “Jesus.”
They found his shoes and socks first—on the bank a couple hundred yards or so past the waterspill. Then, a little before noon, two guys from the rescue squad found his body, in waist-deep water, caught up in the branches of a fallen tree. He’d floated about half a mile or so down, they figured. The rocks had banged him up pretty bad; there were scratches all over his face from that tree. Ray told me. He was the one who went down and identified the body. The water was rushing around and over him, someone told him; the current was still pretty wild from all that rain. Later, the coroner’s report would estimate the time of drowning at somewhere around 4:00 A.M.—right about the time my phone had rung. “Accidental,” he’d ruled, in spite of the shoes and socks. Whether Thomas had jumped or fallen in, none of us could really say.
It was nighttime by the time all the necessary paperwork had been gotten through. Ray and I sat at the kitchen table over on Hollyhock Avenue and drank from the same bottle of Scotch we’d cracked open the night Ma died, four years earlier. We were both pretty quiet at first, both exhausted. But the second round gave us our tongues.
“They tried to tell me to take it slow,” I said. “His social worker, the doctors. They said he’d feel unprotected after six months down there. But I knew better than any of them, of course. I was the big expert. . . . You know what it is? I’m arrogant. That’s my problem. If I wasn’t so goddamned arrogant, he’d probably be alive right now. He’d be okay.”
Ray reminded me that Thomas hadn’t been okay since he was nineteen years old.
“Yeah?” I said. “Well, that doesn’t make me feel any less like shit.”
Ray said he wished to hell he had gone down and seen him at Hatch—had made the effort. But after that stunt he’d pulled over at the library—Jesus Christ, cut off his own hand—well, that had been the last straw for him. “I’d had it,” he said. “But not you. You fought that kid’s battles his whole life.” Ray’s big, rough hand—hardened by work, by war—reached across the table. Hovered above my shoulder for a second or two and then clamped on. Squeezed. As if we were father and son after all. As if, now that Thomas was dead, I could forget the way Ray had treated him. . . .
I stood up from the table, reeling a little from the Scotch. From my stepfather’s alien touch. “I’m cocked,” I said.
“Stay here tonight, then,” he said. “Bunk up in your old room.”
If I’d been sober, I would have refused. Would have gone home instead of up those stairs and down the hall to the left—to the Dominick and Thomas Museum.
I flopped face down on the bottom bunk—Thomas’s bed. Ray came in with a set of sheets. “Just put ’em on the bureau,” I said. “I’ll get ’em in a few minutes.”
“Okay,” he said. “Get some sleep. It’s over now.”
The hell it is, I thought. Numb as I was from Scotch and loss and exhaustion, I knew that was a crock of shit.
Somewhere in the middle of that night, I dreamt I was Thomas—that it was Dominick who had drowned, not me. I heard a lock tumble, a metallic squeak. The door of my prison cell gaped open. “Oh, hi, Ma,” I said. “Guess what? Dominick died.”
I awoke in the morning on the top bunk—my bunk. The sheets were still on the bureau where Ray had left them. I had no recollection of having climbed up there. The bedroom was flooded with light. I lay still, staring up at the ceiling—at the brown water stain over by the window that had been there since we were kids.
And as I lay there, a memory came back—the earliest memory I’ve ever had. I was four again. It was so vivid, so real. . . .
I’m supposed to be lying down, taking my afternoon nap because I’m a big boy. I’m all by myself. No Thomas. Before my Thomas got sick, we took our naps together on the big bed in the spare room. Ma would lie between us, telling us stories about two best friends, a little bunny rabbit named Thomas and a little monkey named Dominick, who always gets into things.
Now Ma’s too busy to tell stories. She has to take Thomas’s temperature and bring him medicine and ginger ale. She gave me some books and told me to look at the pictures until I felt sleepy. I know the letters in the books: m is for Ma, t is for Thomas. I hate the pages where I scribbled on the pictures. Ma asked me who did it and I told her Thomas did. Thomas is a bad, bad, bad, bad boy.
My Thomas has to live in the spare room now. I can draw pictures for him, but I can’t have them back. I can call to him through the door, but he can’t answer me because his throat hurts and because he needs rest. Yesterday he answered me in a tiny, tiny voice. Did he shrink? Is he a little tiny Thomas now? “What does Thomas look like?” I asked Ma. She says he looks the same, except he has red dots on his neck and on the tips of his elbows and something the doctor called a strawberry tongue.
I like strawberry Jell-O better than green Jell-O. When I lick the top, Ma says, “Don’t do that! Only bad boys do that.” One day yesterday I stuck my tongue out in the mirror. No strawberries.
And I am MAD at my Thomas. I had to get a shot and it hurt. I wanted Ma to take me to get my shot, but Ray took me. He told me the needle wouldn’t hurt but it did hurt. When I cried, Ray squeezed my arm and said, “What’s the matter with you? Are you a tough guy or a sissy?” When Thomas and I both cry, Ray says, “Wah, wah, wah, it’s the little sissy girls.” That makes us cry more.
Ma says last night Thomas got the shakes so bad that his teeth chattered. “Show me!” I said and she made her teeth go click click click. Thomas gets to drink all the ginger ale he wants AND there’s a bowl of Jell-O downstairs in the refrigerator that’s only for him, not me. When I go downstairs, I’m going to lick it. My Thomas is a bad, bad boy.
When you’re big, you don’t have to take naps. You can stay up late and watch the Friday night fights and drink highballs. When I’m big, I’m going to fill up the whole bathtub with ginger ale and jump in and drink it and not even get sick.
When Ma was a little girl, she got scarlet fever like Thomas. She had to stay in bed all day long and bang a pot on the wall for Mrs. Tusia next door if she needed help because her father was sleeping. . . . Little boys and girls used to die from scarlet fever, Ma says. Or they got better but grew weak hearts.
I’m not supposed to get off this bed until after my nap. If I get up, Ma is going to tell Ray. Naps make me mad. They’re dumb. I’m rolling and rolling up in my bedspread. I’m a hot dog and my blanket is a hot dog bun. . . . Now I stand up and my bed’s a GIANT TRAMPOLINE! I jump! And jump! All the way up to Heaven where Mrs. Tusia lives. . . . She died. She was old. Some men came and carried her down the steps and drove her away. But I won’t let those men take my Thomas. I’ll shoot them. Pow! Pow! Pow! Ma says Thomas can come out of the spare room in one week, but I don’t know when that is. I think maybe he’s dead. The man on Ma’s opera records is dead and he can sing. “Ladies and gentlemen, Enrico Caruso!” They used to be Papa’s records. Papa is in Heaven, too.
Why can’t I see Thomas? Why can’t I touch the drawings he’s touched? This nap is making me hot. And thirsty, too. I’m thirsty for some ice cold Canada Dry ginger ale.
“Ma! . . . Ma-aa?”
“What?”
“After your nap. Now go to sleep!”
The brown stain on the ceiling turns into that monster. It’s going to come alive and fly down the hallway and bang the door down and eat my brother. Unless I shoot it.
My bedroom rug is a giant lake. The flowers in it are stones. They lead to the edge. . . . I can make it. I do make it.
I’m at the doorway. Sometimes Ma says she’s going to tell Ray when I’m bad and then she doesn’t tell him. The hallway is a boiling river. You can’t swim in it. You have to fly over it in your airplane, the Song Bird. “Hang on, Thomas. I will save you!” I’m Sky King. This isn’t my hand; it’s my radio.
I fly the Song Bird over the boiling river to Thomas’s door. Stare at it. Listen.
I put my fingers on the big diamond doorknob. It twists, clicks open. I enter the room. . . .
It’s dark in here. The shades are pulled down. It smells bad. The fan from Ma and Ray’s room is in the window, blowing a breeze. I walk over to the bed. Stare at my Thomas. I say his name over the whirr of the fan. “Thomas? Thomas Birdsey! . . . THOMAS JOSEPH BIRDSEY!”
Thomas’s mouth is closed. I want to see his strawberry tongue. Is he asleep or dead? . . .
He sighs.
I move closer. His shirt is off. I see the bones beneath his skin. His hands are raised above his head, palms out, as if some cowboy had said, “Stick ’em up!” and then shot him anyway.
Chattering teeth, a strawberry tongue. . . . Suddenly, I know something I never knew before. Thomas and I are not one person. There are two of us.
I move closer, bend down to his ear, and whisper my name.
He twitches. Swats at the sound.
“Dominick!”
We are different people.
Thomas is sick and I am not.
He’s asleep. I’m awake.