I spent the next several weeks tying up loose ends on Thomas’s stuff, checking in with Doc Patel, and watching too much baseball. The Red Sox, mostly: bunch of bigger hopeless cases than I was. In between innings, I was trying to figure out my future.
Wake up, Birdsey, I kept telling myself. It’s May. Every other painter in town’s already out there. Then I’d reach for the remote and locate a game, list my excuses. It was like those grief books said: you didn’t get over a brother’s death right away—an identical twin’s, especially. . . . Going up and down on ladders all day was going to put a lot of stress on my foot and ankle again. I’d paid good money for workmen’s comp insurance; might as well use it until it ran out.
Truth was, I’d never loved housepainting. I’d fallen into it running away from teaching. Guys who’d started after me, younger painters, were contracting a lot of their jobs now. Danny Jankowski employed four guys, two of them full-time. He’d called me a while back, said he heard I might be bailing and wondered if I wanted to sell my power-washing equipment. The vultures were already swarming.
But painting houses wasn’t unsatisfying work. You had your good karma jobs, your decent clients. It felt pretty good when you drove away on that last day, paid in full, having restored a little color to someone’s shit-brown life.
But this was part of the trouble: I still saw Henry Rood’s face up there in that window. Still felt myself falling. Jankowski had said he’d need an answer about the power washer by the end of the week. That’d been two weeks ago.
“Indecision was Hamlet’s fatal flaw, Dominick,” Doc Patel said one afternoon.
“Oh, man,” I groaned. “Don’t tell me you have a Ph.D. in Shakespeare, too?”
Since our last appointment, she’d put a new toy on the table: a thick green liquid encased in a rectangle of glass. I reached over and picked it up, made it make waves. “To paint or not to paint,” I mumbled. “That is the question.” But when I looked up, the good doctor was shaking her head.
“To be or not to be,” she said. “To get on with your life or create your own version of your brother’s imprisonment. To drown or not to drown.”
She was hitting below the belt, I thought. Ten minutes earlier, I’d described for her the latest exchange dream I’d had. In this one, Dominick had died and I, Thomas, was at the wheel of the hearse, driving his body around in search of some elusive cemetery.
“Have you called the State Board of Education yet?”
I jockeyed that wave-making toy of hers back and forth, back and forth. “Nope.”
“Why not?”
I shrugged. In the session before, she had informed me that my shrugging in response to difficult questions was a hostile, not a helpful, response—a passive-aggressive habit I should work on. Officially, Dr. Patel was neutral on the subject of what I should do with the rest of my life, but you could tell she was rooting for my return to teaching. You could read it between the lines. It had been my idea, initially; I’d mentioned it as a possibility two or three appointments back. But since then, I’d begun to actually notice high school kids again. At the mall, at fast-food places. They’d gotten coarser, more desperate or something. All that gang stuff kids were into now, all that bad language. The week before I’d stood in line at Subway behind two girls in Raiders jackets. “That fuckin’ bitch gets in my face about him, I’ll bust her fuckin’ nose,” one of them told the other. “Who the fuck she think she is?” She was beautiful, this kid. Hispanic. These delicate, china doll features. . . . I pictured myself standing in a classroom in front of her and her friend—trying to teach those two about the relevance of history.
“Dominick?”
“What?”
“Why haven’t you called?”
I started to shrug but stopped myself. “I don’t know. I been busy.”
“Yes? Doing what?”
Watching CNN, C–SPAN. Watching baseball history in the making. The week before, I’d seen Rickey Henderson steal his 939th base and Nolan Ryan pitch his seventh career no-hitter on the same frickin’ day. Not that I dared mention baseball to Doc Patel. “Those books you’ve been having me read?” I said. “About the grieving process? Couple of them said that it’s natural to lose focus for a while. Feel a little spaced out or whatever. That it’s to be expected.” She nodded, said nothing. “What? Why are you smiling?”
“Am I smiling?” she asked.
I clunked her stupid wave-maker back onto the table. “I meant to call. I keep . . . I keep thinking about it after it’s too late.”
“Too late?”
“After hours, I mean. It’ll dawn on me that I forgot and I’ll look up at the clock and it’ll be like fifteen minutes after they close.” She gave me one of those who’s-zooming-who looks and waited. “I guess I should write myself a note. That’s what I’ll do: write a note and leave it by the phone. . . . Maybe if they closed their offices at five instead of four-thirty, like the rest of the free world.” Lose the snotty tone, Birdsey, I advised myself. She’ll dismantle you for it. There’s precedent.
Flipping through her notes, Dr. Patel reminded me that, two sessions ago, I had dictated a list of goals for myself. “Do you remember, Dominick? You told me that it would make you feel better to act on several things instead of continuing to vacillate. You felt that your indecision was depressing you. . . . Ah, yes, here it is. Shall we review your list?”
As if I had a choice.
“Number one,” she said. “Call the State Board of Education to inquire about my teaching license. Number two, make a final decision about my business. Number three, acknowledge sympathy cards and gifts. Number four, clear the air with Ray.” She asked me if I’d called back the “gentleman” who was interested in buying my equipment.
“How can I call him back when I haven’t decided?” I said.
“To let him know that you are still mulling over his inquiry.”
I told her Jankowski was interested in my power washer, not my mulling patterns. “Anyways, he’s probably gone elsewhere by now.” I shifted in my chair. What was I supposed to do? Rush into a decision about my frickin’ livelihood just to please her?
“What about the sympathy cards?”
“Hmm?”
“Have you written back to the people who—”
“Yeah, I did that.” Which was a lie. Every time I sat at my kitchen table, I’d just stare at that stack of sympathy and it would short-circuit whatever promises I’d made. I hadn’t even opened most of those cards yet. “I started, anyway. I’m about halfway done.”
Doc Patel nodded in misplaced approval. It would energize me, she said, to begin to cross things off my list. Depression was, in some ways, a crisis of energy. I had heard her say that before; we were in reruns.
“I’ll have them finished next time I come in,” I said. “Definitely. Not a problem.” I would, too; I’d keep the TV off and start them that night.
Doc Patel closed her pad. “What about your grandfather’s history, Dominick?”
“What about it?” I couldn’t remember having put Domenico’s life story on my list.
“Well, we haven’t chatted about that for a while. The last time we discussed it, you were telling me how painful it was to read it. Do you remember? We discussed whether it was better for you to finish the history or just stop.”
She waited. I couldn’t speak.
“Do you remember what your decision was?”
I nodded. “I said I wanted to finish it. Get it over with. Get it behind me. . . . I don’t remember putting it on my list though.”
“You didn’t. But I thought that as long as we were on the subject of procrastination and its connection to this depression you’re feeling, it might be—”
“I’m almost finished with it.”
“That was what you told me the last time—that you had about fifteen pages left.”
“Look,” I said. “The reason I’m depressed is because my brother died. Not because of some stupid things on a list. . . . We were twins, okay? It hurts.”
She nodded. “Understandable. But right now we’re talking about—”
“Why’d you even give me those books to read—all those photocopied articles about how bereavement’s a process, about the special needs of a grieving twin if . . . if you expect me to just be over it in fifteen minutes?”
“I don’t expect you to be over it in fifteen minutes.”
“I mean, he’s locked up in psycho-prison for seven months. Then he gets out and drowns—kills himself, most likely—and I’m supposed to just go, ‘Oh well, that’s over with. Onward and upward. Time to make some major career change.’”
Dr. Patel said she most certainly understood that bereavement was a complicated process—that its movement was both forward and backward, a series of small steps over time, and not always manageable or predictable. She granted me, as well, that the circumstances surrounding Thomas’s death and the fact that we were identical twins and had had a complicated relationship further entangled matters. She acknowledged my pain, she said; she neither slighted nor underestimated it. An important part of her job was to listen to my testament about Thomas’s death and to explore with me my complex responses to it. But as my advocate for a mentally healthy life as a surviving twin—and, she said, she wished to emphasize that fact: that she was my advocate, not my adversary—she could not in good conscience take money for our therapy sessions and then allow me to immobilize myself under the guise of grief. Yes, grieving was a painful process. Yes, one negotiated one’s losses through a series of steps. But one lived in the meantime. One accommodated the reality of death while living life. Dreams or no dreams, I was not Thomas, she said. I was Dominick. My heart beat; I drew breath. I needed to face not only my brother’s death but my own life as well.
She consulted her list again. My list. “Have you called Ray yet?”
Bingo. The $64,000 question. All the rest had just been warmups.
In my first appointment after Thomas’s funeral, I’d told her about my public tirade against my stepfather—how, after she and Sheffer had left the house on Hollyhock Avenue that day, I’d fired on Ray. Had taken him down in front of witnesses. That session had been a marathon; she’d canceled her last appointment and we’d gone on for an hour and a half longer than my scheduled time. By the end of that particular fun fest, most of the remaining Birdsey family secrets had fallen like dominoes: Thomas and my mother “playing nice” upstairs; my giving them up to Ray that afternoon when he’d come home unexpectedly. Before that session was over, I’d screamed and sobbed and chanted exactly the way my brother had chanted that night. Let . . . me . . . out . . . of . . . here! PLEASE . . . let . . . me . . . out! When we were done, Doc Patel had walked me down the stairs and out to my car, praising me for my big breakthrough—for having lifted the burden of all those secrets and begun, in earnest, my healing process.
And I’d felt unburdened, too. I’d driven away from her office feeling battle-weary but free. But it had turned out to be a pretty quick buzz; it had lasted only about as long as the ride home. Granted, I’d taken the scenic route—had driven past the old homestead on Hollyhock Avenue, out past Dessa’s. But by the time I pulled up to my cookie-cutter condo that night—my sorry-ass home sweet home—the despair had already set in. Most of the anger was gone, granted, but hopelessness had seeped into the spaces. Hopelessness, exhaustion. I’d felt tired ever since. . . .
Because what good’s confession without penance—right, Father Guglielmo? Right, Father LaVie? Getting your head shrunk could only take you so far, and then it came time to drop to your knees and humble yourself. Ask forgiveness of God the Father. Or, in my case, God the Stepfather. And, goddamnit, my knees just didn’t seem to bend that way.
So I’d been avoiding Ray. Not answering the messages he kept leaving on my machine. Not going over there. I couldn’t “clear the air” with him, whether or not I had put it on my list of goals. Whether or not he’d gone out there that morning of the funeral and planted those tulips for my mother, my brother . . . and my baby daughter. He’d been decorating Angela’s grave all along, I’d found out. Almost eight years. But I still couldn’t forgive him. Couldn’t let bygones be bygones, surrender to the statute of limitations. And anyway, how could I let Ray be my old man when I was still waiting for the real thing? Still waiting for my real old man to show up and save the day?
“Dominick?”
“What?”
“My goodness, you’re distracted today. I asked you if you had called your stepfather yet.”
I answered her by not answering.
“When do you think you’ll be ready to take that step?” she said. “What is your deadline, please?”
I shrugged.
At the doorway to her outer office, I thanked her, told her I’d see her on Friday—our standard adios. But the good doctor threw me a curveball. She was canceling our Friday appointment, she said. I should call her once I had accomplished the things on my list. She would look forward to speaking with me at that point.
I stood there, smiling, as embarrassed as I was pissed. “What is this? ‘Tough love’ or something?”
She said she supposed it was. Wished me good luck and closed the door.
Answering the sympathy cards wasn’t that bad, once I started. Not opening them had been worse. I’d gotten a card from the crew down at Sherwin-Williams, a couple of notes from teachers at the school where I had taught. Ruth Rood sent her condolences. She was retiring at the end of the semester, she said. Putting her house on the market. She and her sister were planning to do some traveling. I had never even acknowledged her husband’s bullet to the brain. Her sympathy card made no mention of him, either.
I wrote all the insides first. Depersonalized it as much as possible. Turned it into an assembly line. Thank you for your kindness at this difficult time. Much appreciated. . . . Thank you for your kindness at this difficult time. Much appreciated. . . . My ex-in-laws had sent this oversized gold foil job, Mass cards from the Greek church inside. I’d have to remember to tell Ray at some point: Thomas had gotten his church service after all. Services. Six Greek Masses. The Constantines had sent flowers to the funeral home, too—an arrangement twice the size of Ray’s and mine. Big Gene’s signature was on the sympathy card, not just Thula’s. I wondered how Thula was doing since her tumble off the stool that day. I’d have to ask Leo. Dizziness could mean a lot of things. . . . It was funny, really. Whenever I saw Big Gene down at the dealership, he could barely acknowledge my existence. Then my brother dies, and he’s the king of condolences. . . . That big flower arrangement had probably been turned into a tax write-off. The Mass cards, too, for all I knew. Thank you for your kindness at this difficult time. Much appreciated.
Mrs. Fenneck sent me a card—the librarian who’d called 911 that day and then shown up at the condo. Asking for forgiveness or dispensation or whatever the hell it was she’d wanted me to dispense that day. “My husband passed away a month ago,” she wrote now. “I pray for your loss and ask you to pray for mine. I’m glad your brother has finally found peace.” Well, peace be with you, too, Mrs. Fenneck. Peace on earth, good will toward widows and librarians. Thank you for your kindness at this difficult time. Much appreciated.
I didn’t recognize the address on the card at the bottom of the pile, but I sure as hell knew the handwriting. It turned out not to be a sympathy card; it was a birth announcement. Tyffanie Rose. Six pounds, seven ounces. Eighteen inches long.
California hadn’t worked out for them, Joy wrote. They had moved back East again—to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where Thad had once been stationed. He was working as a masseur at a “wellness” clinic now; she was waitressing at a Mexican restaurant. Things weren’t going that great between them. It was pretty complicated. She had some decisions to make. Tyffanie was an easy baby, though—six weeks old and already sleeping through the night. “I’ve screwed up almost everything in my whole life, Dominick,” Joy wrote. “Tyffanie’s the one thing I managed to do right.”
She’d enclosed a picture—one of those shots they take in the hospital that prove once and for all that we’re related to the apes. Tyffanie Rose: dopey name, cutesy spelling. Typical. I studied the wrinkly little twerp, wished her good luck. She was going to need it with those two washouts for parents. . . . What were you supposed to do with pictures like that, anyway? Throw ’em out? Stuff ’em in a drawer someplace? Little Miss Monkey Face there had nothing at all to do with me, despite the fact that her mother had tried to trick me into thinking I was her father. Toss it, I told myself. I got up, got halfway over to the wastebasket, and then changed my mind. Shoved her into my shirt pocket because I couldn’t think what else to do. Sat back down to my assembly line.
I stamped all the cards I’d written, put the stack over by the phone. “Call State Department of Education!” I scrawled on one of the extras. Put it on the top of the pile to remind myself.
I went into the living room and flopped onto the couch. Reached for the remote. I’d mail the cards first thing in the morning. Emily Post and Dr. Patel would both be happier than pigs in shit. At least I’d accomplished that much—could cross one thing off my list.
Seinfeld . . . The Simpsons . . . the Sox. Boston was playing New York that night. Clemens was on the mound. Butter-butt. Big overpaid baby. Baseball’s nothing but a three-hour waste of time. . . . Yeah, but the sympathy cards are done, I reminded myself; you’ve earned seven or eight innings’ worth of down time. . . .
By the time I woke up, the late news was on: Rajiv Gandhi burning on a funeral pyre, Queen Elizabeth knighting Norman Schwarzkopf for having done such a bang-up job of killing Iraqis. And then, something closer to the bone: Duane Taylor being led down the courthouse steps.
He’d been arraigned that morning on 115 counts, the reporter said. The charges ranged from the aggravated sexual assault of eleven mentally unstable patients to racketeering—the consistent, methodical, and ongoing use of a state facility in the conducting of criminal activities. From the look of things, Taylor had fully recovered from his garroting, but there was nothing left of that cocky attitude I’d seen down at Hatch: him out there in that recreation yard in his cowboy hat, the big man who held the cigarette lighter and the ring of keys. He could get life if convicted, the reporter said, but the case was tricky—reliant on unreliable witnesses. When Dr. Yup had examined my brother, she’d found inconclusive evidence. But I was goddamned if I was giving Taylor the benefit of the doubt. Burn in hell, I told that hollow-cheeked motherfucker as they led him, handcuffed, into the backseat of a cruiser. Die forever.
I deadened the set, killed the lights in the kitchen. Went into my bedroom thinking I’d never get to sleep—not with a dozing session already under my belt and freakin’ Duane Taylor on my mind. I brushed my teeth, washed my face, and flopped belly-down onto my bed. Lay there in the dark, thinking about those things still on my list: call Jankowski about the power washer, call the State Board of Ed.
Doc Patel was right, I knew that: grief or no grief, I had to get on with it.
Call Ray.
Finish my grandfather’s book. . . .
I reached under my bed and felt for it in the dark: Domenico’s manuscript. “The History of Domenico Onofrio Tempesta, a Great Man from Humble Beginnings.” Once I finished that thing, I’d have a fuckin’ bonfire out in the backyard. Good riddance, you pompous motherfucker.
Mother fucker. “Motherfucker,” I said. In the dark, out loud.
Faced, for the first time, why I had not been able to bring myself to finish Domenico’s story.
Because I was afraid, that was why.
Afraid that, by the end, he might have spoken the truth. Spelled it out in black and white. . . . Was that why she’d never been able to tell us? Had he taken advantage of his harelipped daughter’s weakness, her innocence? . . . Was our father not the dashing stenographer but our own grandfather?
I lay there at the entrance of the black hole, feeling its pull. . . . Was that it, Ma? Had you been too weak to say no to him? Had Thomas and I been conceived in evil?
Sometime later on that night—after the shaking had subsided, after I was able to move voluntarily again—I rolled over in the dark. I heard a soft crinkling under me and reached over, turned on the light. Fished inside my shirt pocket. . . .
I squinted at her—Tyffanie Rose. Little Miss Monkey Face. I brought the picture to my lips and kissed it.
I put it over on my nightstand for safekeeping and turned the light off again. Lay there smiling, for some reason, in the dark.
The following morning, I drove to the post office and mailed those cards. Drove down to the beach and stood there, watching the waves, the seagulls. On my way home again, I drove right past the exit for Three Rivers. Drove all the way up to Hartford and pulled, spur of the moment, into that Cinema 1-through-500 place off of I-84. Sat there, in the dark, watching Bruce Willis and his testosterone save the free world. Again. Balls to the walls, man. Might made right. . . . Bomb those Iraqis. Hog-tie the black man, beat him with billy clubs. Make a fist and show your wife who’s the boss. . . .
I drove home again. Faced the phone.
Beep. “Dominick? It’s Leo. Hey, I was wondering if you were ready to let me beat your ass in some racquetball yet? Or are you still pussying around about that foot of yours? That excuse is getting old, Birdsey. Let me know.”
Beep. “This is your old man calling. You home yet? Give me a jingle, will ya?” Will do, Ray. Mind if I wait until hell freezes over first?
Beep. “Hey, Dominick. This is Lisa Sheffer. Just wanted to let you know I’ve been thinking about you. . . . Just wondering, basically, how you’re doing. So call me. Okay?”
Beep. “Ray Birdsey. Four-fifteen P.M. You home yet?”
I’m canceling our Friday appointment, Dominick. Call me after you’ve accomplished the things on your list. . . .
Jankowski’s wife told me she’d ask him, but she doubted he was still interested. He’d bought a power washer on Monday from some outfit in Cumberland, Rhode Island.
The third woman they referred me to at the State Department of Education was able to answer my questions about reinstatement. I’d need to take a refresher course, she said, and then take a test, and then have three classroom observations by a state-trained evaluator.
Forget about it, I told myself. The writing’s on the wall. You’re a housepainter.
Domenico’s manuscript stayed under the bed.
I’d call Ray the next day, I told myself. I’d already accomplished plenty. I turned the TV on, turned it off again. Reached over for the Rolodex.
Shea, Sherwin-Williams, Sheffer . . .
She’d been thinking about me a lot, she said. I had been such a good brother. She just wanted to make sure I wasn’t beating myself up about things.
I thanked her—told her I hadn’t KO’d myself just yet. I decided to skip the counterargument I could have given her about what a good brother I’d been.
She wanted to know what else was new—what I’d been up to.
Not much, I said. I was trying to decide whether or not to sell my business.
“Really?” she said. “You don’t feel like painting houses anymore?”
“I don’t feel like falling off roofs anymore.”
Somewhere during the conversation, I figured out something: Sheffer felt guilty. She’d been beating herself up. It had been her idea to put Thomas in Hope House, the place he’d wandered away from that night. When they’d sprung him so unexpectedly from Hatch, Sheffer had made an issue of how the group home would be a much safer temporary environment for him than my place.
“Look, Lisa,” I said. “I want you to know something, okay? Nobody’s blaming you for anything. You did everything you could for him and then some—up to and including getting whacked in the face at that hearing. We’d all be a bunch of geniuses if we had hindsight ahead of time.”
She said Dr. Patel had told her basically the same thing. She’d started seeing Dr. Patel, by the way. Professionally. Not to be nosy, but was I still seeing her?
“Uh, yeah,” I said. “Off and on.” So much for confidentiality.
Sheffer advised me to discuss my decision about the painting business with Dr. Patel—that she might be able to help me “objectify” my options. Social worker talk.
“I have talked about it with her,” I said.
“And?”
“She thinks I should pack it in. Go back to teaching.” Sheffer said she could picture me in front of a high school class.
I could, too—that was the problem: I kept seeing those two little tough cookies I’d stood behind at Subway. Kept remembering those students’ faces that day I’d cried in front of them. That day I’d left my classroom and never gone back. Diana Montague, Randy Cleveland, Josie Tarbox. Those kids must all be in their midtwenties by now. Out of college, into adult lives. Kids of their own, now, some of them. “Yeah, well,” I told Sheffer. “I may sell the business, I may not. I’m still weighing my options. But anyway, I’m grateful for everything you did for my brother. I mean it, Lisa. Thanks.”
“Hey, you know what?” she said. “Would you like to get together sometime? Come over for dinner? I can make you my Jewish-Italian specialty: spaghetti and matzoh balls?” I started stammering something about appreciating the invitation but—
“I’m not asking you out,” she said. “If that’s what you think. I’m asking you over.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well. . . .”
“I’m not hitting on you, paisano. Honest. I’m gay, Dominick.”
“Oh. Right. I didn’t think . . . I mean, I don’t have a problem with . . . You are?”
She suggested we start over. “Hello, Dominick? This is Lisa Sheffer. You want to come over some night for supper? Meet my daughter and my partner, Monica?”
I didn’t know what else to say, so I said okay. Asked her what I could bring.
“Bottle of chianti and a bottle of Mogen David,” she said. “We’ll mix ’em.”
“They were so much alike,” I said. “In some ways, they were more like identical twins than he and I were.”
“Thomas and your mother? Yes? Explain, please.”
Over the phone, I’d told her what I had and hadn’t acomplished on my list. She’d given me bonus points for having made dinner plans with Sheffer—for having “engaged outwardly” instead of continuing my “love affair with inertia.” Her Majesty had granted me a two o’clock appointment.
“I don’t know. They were both so gentle. So defenseless. . . . Every year she’d go to parent-teacher conferences and come back and we’d be like, ‘What did she say? What did the teacher say?’ And every year, one teacher after the next, it’d be the same thing: how smart I was, how sweet he was. That was always the word they used: Thomas was so ‘sweet.’ And he was, too. He just was. But . . .”
“Yes? Go on.”
“He was weak. Just like she was. . . . I had to take care of both of them. And I think . . .”
She waited several seconds. “You think what, Dominick?”
“I think . . . oh, man, this is hard . . . I think that was why she loved him more. Because both of them were so goddamned powerless. . . . It was like they were soul mates or something.”
Dr. Patel sipped her tea. Waited.
“Do you think . . . ?” I stopped, stymied by how to put it. My hands started to shake.
“What is it, Dominick? Ask me.”
“No, I was just thinking yesterday that maybe that’s how she got pregnant. . . . I mean, it would explain a lot. Wouldn’t it?”
Doc Patel said she wasn’t following me.
“She was always so scared to death of everything. So powerless. So I was thinking: maybe she got raped.”
“Raped by . . . ?”
“I don’t know. By some stranger. Maybe our father was just some miscellaneous son of a bitch who grabbed her, pulled her into a dark alley someplace, and . . .”
I stood up, went over by the window. Rocked back and forth on my heels.
“It’s not like she would have fought back or anything. I know she wouldn’t have. She probably didn’t even know what sex was until . . . She probably wouldn’t even have known what he was doing.”
“No? You think not?”
I looked out the window. The river was moving fast. The trees were budding. In another week or two, those unfolding leaves would obscure Doc Patel’s view of the water. I turned back and faced her. “This one time? We were pretty young, Thomas and me—seven or eight, maybe. And we were on the city bus: the three of us.”
“Your mother, Thomas, and you?”
I nodded. “We’d gone to the movies, I remember, and then over to the five-and-ten for sodas. And we were on our way back home, okay? On the bus. And . . . and this crazy guy gets on. Walks down the aisle and sits across from us. . . . Across from Thomas and me. He pushes in right next to my mother.”
“Go on, please, Dominick. You’re safe here. Let it go.”
“And he starts . . . feeling her. Touching her. Sniffing at her.”
“Be yourself on the bus for a moment. Are you afraid?”
“Yes.”
“Angry?”
“Yes!”
“What does your mother do, Dominick? The man is touching her and she—”
“Nothing! That’s what she does: nothing! She just sits there because she’s so . . . so weak and . . . “
Dr. Patel handed me the Kleenex box. “She doesn’t scream? She doesn’t get up and tell the bus driver?”
“No! And I hated that! . . . She was always so afraid.”
“On the bus. At home with Ray.”
“It wasn’t fair! I was just a kid!”
“What wasn’t fair, Dominick?”
“I had to defend all three of us. Myself, and him, and her. And even then . . . even when I did . . .” I was sobbing now; I couldn’t help it.
“And even then, although you protected her and your brother—fought both of their battles for them—even then, she loved your brother more than you?”
My head jerked up and down, up and down. I couldn’t speak. Couldn’t stop wailing at the truth.
The boys have the muscles! The coaches have the brains!
The girls have the sexy legs so let’s play the game!
Sheffer’s daughter, Jesse, shook her pom-poms like she meant it. She’d befriended me even before I’d gotten both feet in the door. Within the first half-hour of my visit, I’d been brought down to the basement to see her gerbils, up to her room to see her Barbies. Now I was out on the driveway so I could see her Midget Football cheerleader moves. Sheffer and Monica stood flanking me while Jesse turned cartwheels. “My theory is that Olivia Newton-John went into labor the same day and they mixed up our babies in the nursery,” Sheffer said, under her breath. “There’s just no other explanation.”
Monica was a rugged six-footer from Kittery. She and another woman ran a small home-repair business. Womyn’s Work, they called themselves.
“So how’s business?” I asked her, my chin pointing toward her pickup, parked in the driveway. Jesse had fallen, midcheer, and scraped her knee. She and her mom had gone inside for a Band-Aid. Monica held her arm out and gave a thumbs-down.
“Couple of years ago? When we started up? We figured that in this economy, everyone’s just holding on to what they’ve got—fixing things up instead of building new. But it’s been leaner than we figured it’d be. My partner and I are good—we’re damn good—but you’ve got to get past people’s biases.”
“Like what?” I said.
“Like, that you need a penis in order to swing a hammer or knock down a wall.” She laughed. “No offense, there, hombre. Lisa says you’re a housepainter?”
“Technically,” I said. “Maybe not much longer.”
“That’s what Lisa said.” She and her business partner were trying to diversify a little, she told me—pick up some landscaping work, maybe some painting jobs. They were going to decide at the end of the season whether or not they could keep the boat afloat. “If not, I can always go back to my paying job,” she said. “Systems analyst. Bor-ing.”
After dinner, Jesse had to give me two goodnight hugs before Monica piggybacked her up to bed, Sheffer trailing behind them with a stack of laundry. Monica came back down first.
“Jesse’s a cutie,” I said. “Miss Cheerleader, huh?”
“Miss Pain in the Butt, usually,” Monica said. “But she’s a good kid. Throws a baseball like a girl, though.”
I smiled. Asked her how she and Lisa had met.
At the women’s shelter over in Easterly, she said. She’d done some pro bono carpentry work for them the year before and ended up on their Board of Directors.
“Yeah? Is Lisa on the board, too?” I said.
Monica averted her eyes. “Nope. Hey, you want a beer?”
We went out to the kitchen. Shot the shit about the highs and lows of owning your own business. “Hey,” I said. “If I do decide to sell my painting equipment, would you be interested?” Monica said it depended on what it was, what kind of condition it was in, and how I felt about the installment plan. If they did start a painting sideline, they damn sure weren’t going to be able to afford new equipment.
I liked her. Liked being there that night. I had a much better time than I’d figured I would. It was after eleven by the time I even looked at my watch.
Sheffer walked me out to my car. She told me that when she was thirteen, her oldest brother had died of leukemia. “He was eight years older than me,” she said. “My hero, in a lot of ways. But, god, I can’t even imagine what it would be like to lose your twin.”
“It’s like . . . it’s like losing part of who you are. I don’t know. In a lot of ways, we were pretty different. Which was fine with me. Just the way I wanted it. But all my life, I’ve been . . . I’ve been half of something, you know? Something special—something kind of unique—even with all the complications. Wow, look. Twins. . . . And now, that specialness—that wholeness—it just doesn’t exist anymore. So it’s weird. Takes some getting used to. . . . Not that it was ever easy: being his brother. Even before he got sick. Doc Patel says I’m grieving for him—for Thomas—and for that, too. That wholeness.”
Sheffer reached over and took my hand.
“She says I’ve got to get used to my new status. Survivor. Solitary twin.”
I asked Sheffer if she remembered the day they released him from Hatch. How she had tried to warn me not to let my arrogance get in the way of my brother’s safety.
“Oh, Dominick,” she said. “Sometimes I run my mouth when I have no—”
“No, you were right,” I said. “I was arrogant. You think I didn’t get off on that little power arrangement we’d always had? Being the strong one? The twin who didn’t get the disease? . . . That’s something else Doc and I are working on—what to do with all this arrogance I’ve got left over. All this righteous indignation. It’s just sort of sitting there, parked and not doing anything. Like me, I guess.”
Sheffer took me in her arms and held me. Rocked me back and forth a little. It felt good to be held like that—held by someone who’d turned into my friend.
“I’ll be all right,” I said. “Hey, by the way, I like your girlfriend. She may be buying my compressor.”
I was whipped when I got home. Left the kitchen lights off and headed straight to bed. Went out—bam!—like that.
But somewhere in the middle of the night, I woke up thirsty. Fumbled my way out to the kitchen for a glass of juice. The answering machine light was blinking red against the shiny surfaces of the toaster, the door of the microwave. Blink, blink, pause. Blink, blink, pause. I hadn’t noticed it before. I hit “play” and stood there.
The first caller was Joy. Had I gotten her note a while back? The picture she’d sent of Tyffanie? Was I at all interested in seeing the baby in person? If I was, I should give her a call. Maybe we could each drive halfway or something. She said her number slowly, then said it again.
The second message was from a Dr. Azzi. “Your father’s surgeon,” he said.
The operation had gone well; no surprises. He’d amputated just a little above the knee, which was what he’d figured. He was sorry he had missed me at the hospital but would be in touch the next morning. When he’d left the hospital at eight that evening, my father was still groggy but resting comfortably.
Above the knee? Amputated? What the hell was he talking about?
Dr. Azzi’s answering service told me he wasn’t to be called unless it was a medical emergency but that he sometimes called in for his messages before he retired for the evening. The woman said she’d tell him I had called.
Was that why Ray had kept calling me? Was that what that limp had been about?
Amputated. . . .
And maybe I’d have known what was going on if I’d just had the decency to call him back.
He’d planted tulips at Angela’s grave.
Bullied my brother and me our whole lives.
I had humiliated him that day of Thomas’s funeral.
He’d busted my mother’s arm. . . .
Somewhere in the middle of the night, I went into the bedroom. Flopped onto the bed and reached under there.
Pulled out Domenico’s manuscript.
I sat up. Opened it.
I would finish it, this time, no matter what the fuck it revealed. No matter who it told me I was. . . .