“I don’t need to see her, Ray,” he said, not looking at me.
“Well, I’d appreciate it if you’d go. I know Dad thought it was good for you to see her once in a while.”
“I don’t want to go,” he said. “I have work to do.”
“You can do it when you get back. I know you can leave this house if you have to. You’d just rather not.”
“If I had a reason to go, I would go, Ray. But there isn’t one.”
I put my mug of coffee to my lips and took a drink. All Dad ever kept in the house was instant and it was pretty vile, but at least it had caffeine in it. I added a second spoonful of sugar. “There is a reason, Thomas. You, and I, have just been through something pretty traumatic. We’ve lost our father. And as difficult as this is for me to get through, I suspect it’s even more troubling for you. I mean, you guys lived under the same roof.”
“He got mad at me a lot,” Thomas said.
“Like when?”
“He was always telling me to do things I didn’t want to do.” He gave me a look. “Kind of like you right now.”
“But Dad was never mean to you,” I said. “Annoyed once in a while, maybe, but not mean.”
“I guess,” he said. “He didn’t like me staying in my room all day. He wanted me to go out. He didn’t understand how busy I am.”
“It’s not healthy,” I said. “You need some air. Thomas, you have to know, in your heart, that there’s a problem when you’re so addicted to what you’re doing that you don’t even go to Dad’s funeral.”
“I had to go to Melbourne that day,” Thomas said.
“Jesus, Thomas, you did not have to go to Melbourne that day. You did not have to go to Melbourne, or Moscow, or Munich, or fucking Montreal. You needed to go to our father’s funeral.” I knew I wasn’t being fair, blaming Thomas for this. I knew he most likely couldn’t help himself. As soon as I’d said the words, I regretted them. Getting angry with Thomas for not overcoming his obsession was like getting angry with a blind man for not seeing where he was going.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
He didn’t say anything. Neither of us did, for the better part of a minute.
I broke the silence. “I think it’s important, right now, while I’m trying to sort out a few things, that you go see Dr. Grigorin. I’d also like to talk to her.”
Thomas eyed me curiously. “Are you having some issues, too?”
“What?”
“I think, actually, that’s a good idea. You should talk to her. She could help you.”
I blinked. “Help me? Help me with what?”
“About your need to control other people. She might be able to give you something for that. She gives me something to help me with the voices. So she might be able to write you a prescription, too.”
“Well, there’s an idea,” I said.
“You could go on your own,” he suggested. “You can tell me what she had to say when you get back.”
“We’re going together.”
He licked his lips, started opening and closing his fingers. His mouth was getting dry. Anxiety was setting in.
“The appointment’s at eleven,” I said.
“Eleven, eleven, eleven,” he said, casting his eyes upward, like he was trying to remember what he’d written down in his datebook.
“I’m pretty sure you’re free,” I said. “We’ll need to leave here around ten thirty.”
Thomas got out of his chair, took his bowl over to the sink, and rinsed it under the tap. He always left the cleanup to me, so I had an idea just how much he wanted to avoid me.
“Don’t walk away, Thomas.”
“I really have a lot to do,” he said, starting to walk out of the kitchen. “You don’t understand how important it is.”
“You can fiddle around with the GPS in the car.”
That stopped him. “You have a navigational system?”
“Built right into the dashboard,” I said.
He looked at the closet by the front door, where his jacket was hanging. “We could go now.”
“It’s only eight thirty. We don’t want to sit around waiting for the doctor for two hours.”
He thought about that. “Okay, I’ll be ready at ten thirty. But you have to promise to talk to the doctor about your behavior.”
“I promise,” I said.
AFTER Thomas had gone up to his room, and I’d finished cleaning up the breakfast dishes, I decided it was time.
I headed out the back door, walked across the yard that was, a full week after it had last been cut, in need of a trim, then came to a stop where the ground sloped down to the creek.
It was, as I’d told Harry Peyton, a steep hill. The kind that, if you felt you had to cut the grass on it, you’d be best doing it with a weed trimmer, or maybe a hand mower. If it got away from you, the worst that could happen is it would bounce down the hill and end up in the water.
A lot of people, had they owned this place, would have been content to end landscaping duties at the hill’s crest. Let the grass and weeds grow wild on the slope. But Dad liked the idea of a groomed yard that went right to the water. The creek didn’t exactly make the Kilbride homestead a beach house, but Dad figured it was as close as he was ever going to come. So every week, spring, summer, and fall, Dad did the hill when he cut the grass on the rest of the property.
I remember Mom asking me, during one of our phone chats about a year before she died, to talk my father out of his practice of riding the mower on this hill, side to side, leaning into the slope to keep the machine from tipping over.
“He’s going to get himself killed,” she’d said.
“He knows what he’s doing, Mom.”
“Oh, you men,” she’d said exasperatedly. “I tried to get Harry and Len to talk some sense into him and they said the same thing.”
Turned out the men were wrong.
The tractor, with a green hood and fenders and yellow seat, was sitting upright at the bottom of the hill. The hood was sitting askew over the engine and the tops of the back fenders were scuffed and scraped. The steering wheel was bent.
My understanding was, the tractor had rolled once and landed on Dad. When Thomas got there, it wasn’t possible to roll the tractor back up the hill. It would have been too hard to go in that direction. So he’d given the tractor a shove downward. It had rolled a couple more times and landed on its wheels on level ground just before the creek.
It had been there ever since.
I walked carefully down the hill. It was easy to see where it had all happened. The grass was about three inches high going down the side of the hill, then jumped up to about five. At that point, the ground was torn up where the mower had dug in as it rolled.
I stood a moment, one foot ahead of the other for balance, looking down at the place where my father had taken his last breath. Where that last breath had been crushed out of him. I felt a lump forming in my throat. Then I went down the rest of the way to the machine.
I didn’t know whether I’d be able to get it back to the barn. The accident might have damaged the engine. When it was flipped over, it was possible all the gas had drained out of the tank. The battery might very well be dead.
Tentatively, I swung a leg over and dropped my butt in the seat. It felt odd, sitting there, knowing I was the first person in this seat since my father. The key was still in the ignition, set to OFF. I went to raise the blade housing, which you put into the down position only when you are actually cutting grass, but it was already up.
I put the choke on full, slid the throttle all the way up, and turned the key.
The engine coughed a couple of times and black smoke puffed out of the exhaust. The damn thing roared to life. I brought the choke back down, eased off the throttle, pushed in the clutch, and dropped the machine into its lowest gear to get it back up the hill.
I held my breath the whole time I was making the climb.
Once I’d crested the hill I drove the tractor to
the barn, parked it inside, slid the door shut behind me, and went back into the house.
THOMAS was downstairs, all set to go, at ten. Wearing a blue plaid shirt, olive-colored pants, black shoes, white socks, and a windbreaker the color of a traffic cone.
“Where did you get that jacket?” I asked. “You get a job as a crossing guard?”
“No,” he said blankly. “You know I wouldn’t want a job like that. I don’t like being around little kids.”
“It was a bad joke. Where did you get that?”
“One time, Dad let me go to Walmart to buy some map books, and I saw it on sale. He got it for me.”
“It’s bright,” I said.
“Are you ready to go?”
“We’re a little ahead of schedule,” I said.
“I think we should go.”
“Okay.” I grabbed my own, less fluorescent, sport coat and slipped it on.
We stepped out onto the porch and I locked the front door behind me. I thought Thomas might stand there a moment, to take it all in. There was a cool breeze, but the sun was shining. It was a beautiful day. But Thomas made a beeline for the Audi and yanked on the passenger door handle a couple of times.
“It’s locked,” he said.
“Give me a second.” I dug the remote from my pocket, aimed, and pressed. Thomas got in, put on his seat belt, and watched me impatiently as I came around the car, got in, did up my own belt, and keyed the ignition. The dashboard screen that allowed the driver to monitor dozens of the vehicle’s functions, including the GPS, came to life.
“Okay, how it works is—”
“I can figure it out,” Thomas said. He started turning knobs, touching the screen. “So if I want to enter in an address—”
“You see that thing there? You just—”
“I got it. You put in the city first, right?” I watched him type in “McLean.”
“What are you doing?” Dr. Grigorin’s office was in Promise Falls.
“I want to see what directions it gives for McLean, Virginia,” he said.
“Why the hell would we go to Virginia?” I asked. “That’s hundreds of miles away. The doctor’s ten minutes. Virginia would take us all day.”
“I don’t actually want to go there. I don’t have an appointment or anything. I wanted to see if it would give us the best route.” He studied the screen a moment longer, appeared to get frustrated, and said, “Fine, I’ll enter in the coordinates for the doctor’s office. It’s 2654 Pennington, suite 304.”
“You don’t have to enter the suite number. We’re not mailing her something. We’re driving there.”
Thomas stopped examining the system long enough to look at me. “Do you think I’m stupid?”
The question, coming from anyone else, would have been sarcastic, or confrontational. But Thomas’s tone suggested he was really asking.
“No,” I said. “I don’t. I’m sorry if I came across that way.”
“You think I dress stupid. I could tell. You were making fun of my coat. And now you think I’m too stupid to figure this out.”
“No—I mean, okay, the coat is a bit bright. But I don’t think you’re stupid. You seem to be able to intuit these things almost instantly. Go ahead. Put in the doctor’s address.”
He entered it, waited a couple of seconds for the nav system to figure things out.
“Proceed to the highlighted route,” the car’s computer said.
“That’s Maria,” I said, heading the car down the driveway.
“What?”
“That’s what I call the lady in my dashboard. Maria.”
“Oh,” Thomas said. “Why Maria?”
“I don’t know. She just strikes me as a Maria. Maybe she should be Gretchen or Heidi or something that sounds kind of German, but I like Maria.”
He was studying the screen as I drove down the road and pulled onto the highway. He never took his eyes off the digital map. “We’re just passing Miller’s Lane,” he said.
“You could look out the window and know that,” I said. “Let me ask you something.”
“About what?”
“About when you found Dad. You okay talking about that?”
“This red line,” he said, pointing. “Is that the route the car wants us to take?”
“That’s right. You mind my asking something about when you found Dad?”
“What do you want to know?”
“Either before or after you pushed the tractor off him, did you touch any of the controls on it?”
“What do you mean?”
“Like turn off the key, or lift up the blades?”
“No. I don’t even know how to drive it. Dad never let me use it. This computer is wrong.” He hadn’t taken his eyes off the navigational screen the whole time we’d been talking.
“So you didn’t touch anything,” I said. “On the tractor.”
“That’s right.”
“What about when the ambulance came, or the police. Did any of the paramedics touch it?”
“They only cared about Dad. And I never saw the police do anything with it, but I wasn’t always there. Maybe later they came.”
“But it hasn’t been moved all week,” I said. “It’s been sitting down by the creek this whole time.”
“Did you hear what I said?” Thomas asked.
“About what?”
“This thing is wrong.” He was still staring at the screen.
“What do you mean, wrong?”
“The route. It’s no good.”
“In three hundred yards, make a right turn.”
“Maria’s wrong,” Thomas said.
“She is?”
“She’s telling you the wrong way to go. There’s a faster way to go.”
“She does that sometimes. She tends to stick to the main roads. And some of the really new roads, she doesn’t even know they’re there. Don’t worry about it. Think of Maria as an adviser. You can choose to take her advice, or not.”
“Well, she shouldn’t be giving advice if she doesn’t know what she’s doing.” He started fiddling with the buttons. “How do you tell her she’s making a mistake?”
“I don’t know that—”
“In one hundred yards, make a right turn.”
“No!” Thomas shouted at the screen. “If we go the way she’s suggesting, she’ll take us down Saratoga Street. I don’t want to go down Saratoga Street.”
“What difference does it make?”
“I don’t want to go that way!” He was starting to sound frantic.
“Just tell me which way you want me to go,” I said. “We can tell Maria to take a hike.”
Thomas said he wanted to go downtown by way of Main, not Saratoga. I said okay, since it was about the same distance. I ignored Maria when, as we passed Saratoga, she implored me to turn around. When I kept driving in the same direction, she recalculated the route, but she kept wanting to send us back, eventually, to Saratoga Street.
“Shut up,” Thomas told her.
Maria said, “In three hundred yards, make a left turn.”
“I don’t believe this,” Thomas said. He was becoming increasingly agitated. “Make her stop. Make her stop talking.” He slapped his hand on top of the dashboard, the way my father used to deal with the TV years ago when the horizontal went wonky.
“Just cancel the route,” I said. “That button there.”
Thomas, who’d been so good at entering the data, became flustered when it came to undoing what he’d done.
“Make a right turn.”
“No! We’re not doing it!” Thomas yelled at the dash.
I reached over, fiddled with the settings, and shut her down.
“It’s over,” I said. “I turned her off.”
Thomas sat back in the leather seat and took a few deep breaths. Finally, he looked at me and said, “You should get rid of this car.”
EIGHT
ONCE there was no more fun to be had with the car’s GPS, Thomas became sul
len and asked me to turn around and go home. But I stuck to my guns and said he had an appointment, and we had to keep it.
He sulked.
I took a seat in the waiting room while Thomas went in for his session with Dr. Grigorin. There was one other patient waiting to see her. A very thin woman, late twenties, with long, scraggly blond hair that she kept twisting around her index finger. She was studying a spot on the wall with great interest, like there was a spider there that only she could see.
I glanced at my watch, figured I had a bit of time, and stepped out into the hall. I took out my cell phone, looked up a number online, and tapped to connect.
“Promise Falls Standard,” a woman’s recorded voice said. “If you know the extension, enter it now. To use the company directory, press 2.”
I struggled through the process until an actual phone rang.
“Julie McGill.”
“Julie, hi, this is Ray Kilbride.”
“Oh, hi, Ray. How are things?”
“Things are, you know, they’re okay. Listen, am I catching you at a bad time?”
“Just waiting on another call,” Julie said, her words coming quickly. “I thought this was going to be the principal from Promise Falls High. Trying to get some details on a small explosion in their chemistry class.”
“Jesus.”
“No one got hurt. But they could have. What can I do for you?”
“I wanted, first of all, to thank you for coming to my dad’s funeral. That was really good of you.”
“No problem,” she said.
“I wondered, if you had a second, if we could grab a coffee so I could ask you a couple of questions about my father. Since you did the piece for the paper.”
“It was pretty short. Not much more than a digest item. I don’t have a lot of detail.”
I was picking up, from her tone, that she was worried her other call was going to come in. I was about to tell her to forget about it, apologize for taking up her time, when she said, “But sure. Why don’t you come by around four? We’ll grab a beer. Meet you out front of the paper.”
“Yeah, sure, that would be—”
“Gotta go.” She hung up.