Never Saw It Coming: (An eSpecial from New American Library)

by Linwood Barclay

  He sighed and looked at me sadly across the kitchen table, as though I were a child who had disappointed him by not knowing how to count to five. We looked a lot alike, Thomas and I. Both around five-eleven, thinning black hair, but Thomas had a few pounds on me. I was the slender Vince Vaughn from Swingers, Thomas the meatier Vince Vaughn from The Break-Up. I was definitely healthier looking, but that had nothing do with physical build. When you hardly went outside and spent twenty-three hours a day in your bedroom—he managed to pack breakfast, lunch, and dinner in the kitchen into three twenty-minute interruptions—you developed a pasty, washed-out complexion, an almost sickly pallor. He was probably suffering from a Vitamin D deficiency. He needed a week in Bermuda. And even though he’d never been there, he could probably name me all the hotels and tell me what streets they were on.

  “I said Louvre. Doesn’t that give you some idea where I’m talking about? Louvre, Louvre, think about it.”

  “Of course,” I said. “Paris. You’re talking about Paris.”

  He nodded encouragingly, almost frenetically. He’d already finished the frozen meatloaf dinner I’d heated up in the microwave even though I wasn’t even halfway through my own and was unlikely to finish it. I’d have been happier with buttered foam core. He was sitting in the chair with his body twisted in the direction of the stairs, like he was getting ready to bolt back up there any second. “Right, so you want to get to the Louvre. Which way do you go?”

  “I have no idea, Thomas,” I said tiredly. “I know where the Louvre is. I’ve been to the Louvre. I spent six whole days there when I was twenty-seven. I lived in Paris for a month. I took an art course. But I have no idea where this hotel is you’re talking about. I didn’t stay in a hotel. I was in a hostel.”

  “The Pont Royal,” he said.

  I gave him a blank look, waiting.

  “On the Rue de Montalembert,” he said.

  “Thomas, I have no fucking idea where—”

  “It’s just off the Rue du Bac. Come on. It’s an old hotel, all gray stone, has a revolving door at the front that looks like it’s made of walnut or something like that and right beside it there’s a place that does x-rays or something, because it says mammography and radiology above the windows and above those are some apartments or something with some plants in the windows in clay pots and the building looks like it’s eight stories and on the left side there’s a very expensive-looking restaurant with a black awning thing and dark windows and it doesn’t have any tables and chairs out front like most of the cafés in Paris and—”

  All this from memory.

  “I’m really tired, Thomas. I had to go in and talk to Harry Peyton today.”

  “The Louvre is like the simplest place to get to from there. You can almost see it when you come out of the hotel.”

  “Do you not want to hear what happened at the lawyer’s?”

  He waved his hands busily in front of me. “You go across the Rue de Montalembert and then across a triangle of sidewalk, and then you’re on the Rue du Bac, and then you go right and you walk up that way and you cross the Rue de l’Université and you keep going and you cross the Rue de Verneuil—I’m not sure I’m pronouncing these right because I never took French in high school—and there’s this place on the corner that has all these really good-looking pastries in the window and bread too and then you cross the Rue de Lille but you keep on going and—”

  “Mr. Peyton said the way Dad’s will is set up, he left the house to both of us.”

  “—and if you look straight down the street you can actually see it. The Louvre, I mean. Even though it’s on the other side of the river. You keep going and then you cross the Quai Anatole France on the left, and on the right it’s the Quai Voltaire, I guess the road changes from one name to the other there and you shift a bit to the right but keep going over the bridge, which is the Pont Royal. I think pont means bridge. And when you get to the other side you’re there. See how simple that was? You didn’t have to do any twists or turns or anything. You just go out the door and turn and you’re there. Let’s do a harder one. Name a hotel in any other part of Paris and I’ll tell you how to get there. Shortest route. Although, sometimes, there’s a hundred different ways to get to the same place but it’s still about the same distance. Like New York. Well, not like New York, because the streets are all over the place in Paris and not in square blocks, but you get what I mean, right?”

  “Thomas, I need you to stop for a second,” I said patiently.

  He blinked at me a couple of times. “What is it?”

  “We need to talk about Dad.”

  “Dad’s dead,” he said, again looking at me like I was short a few IQ points. Then, with something that looked like sorrow washing briefly over his face, he glanced out the window. “I found him. By the creek.”

  “I know.”

  “Dinner was late. I kept waiting for him to knock on the door and tell me that it was time to eat, and I was getting really hungry so I came down to see what was going on. I went all over the house first. I went down into the basement, thinking maybe he was fixing the furnace or something, but he wasn’t there. The van was here so he had to be somewhere. When I couldn’t find him in the house I went outside. I looked in the barn first.”

  I’d heard all this before.

  “When I couldn’t find him there I walked around and when I got to the top of the hill I saw him with the tractor on top of him.”

  “I know, Thomas.”

  “I pushed the tractor off him. It was really hard to do but I did. But Dad didn’t get up. So I ran back up here and called 911. They came and they said he was dead.”

  “I know,” I said again. “That must have been pretty awful for you.”

  “It’s still down there.”

  The tractor. I had to bring it back up and put it away in the barn. It had been sitting out there at the bottom of the hill since the accident. I didn’t know whether it would start. For all I knew, the gas had all drained out when the machine was upside down. There was a half-full gas can in the barn if I needed it.

  “There are things that we have to get figured out,” I said. “About what to do, now that Dad’s, you know, passed away.”

  Thomas nodded, thinking. “I was wondering,” he said, “whether it would be okay to put maps on the walls in his bedroom now. I’m running out of space. Because he and Mom said I couldn’t put any on the first floor, or down the stairs, but his room is on the second floor so I was wondering what you thought about that since he’s not sleeping in there anymore. And with Mom already gone, no one’s sleeping in there.”

  That wasn’t exactly true. I’d started off sleeping in the empty bedroom next to Thomas’s, the one Mom had always kept ready for me when I came to visit, which was not that often. But last night I ended up moving down the hall into Dad’s room because I could hear all the mouse-clicking through the wall and couldn’t take it anymore. I’d gone in once to tell Thomas to shut it down but he’d ignored me, so I’d switched beds. I felt funny about it at first, slipping under the covers of my dead father’s bed, but I got over it. I was tired, and I’m not much of a sentimentalist.

  “You can’t live in this house all alone,” I said.

  “I’m not alone. You’re here.”

  “At some point I have to go back home.”

  “You are home. This is home.”

  “It’s not my home, Thomas. I live in Burlington.”

  “Burlington, Vermont. Burlington, Massachusetts. Burlington, North Carolina. Burlington, New Jersey. Burlington, Washington. Burlington, Ontario, Ca—”

  “Thomas.”

  “I didn’t know if you knew how many other Burlingtons there are. You need to be specific. You need to say Burlington, Vermont, or people won’t know where you really live.”

  “I figured you knew,” I said. “Is that what you want me to do? Every time I tell you I have to go back to Burlington, do you want me to add ‘Vermont,’ Thomas?”

  “Don
’t be angry with me,” he said.

  “I’m not angry with you. But we do need to talk about some things.”

  “Okay.”

  “When I go back to my own house, I’m going to be worried about leaving you here on your own.”

  Thomas shook his head, like there was nothing to worry about. “I’ll be fine.”

  “Dad did everything around here,” I said. “He made the meals, he cleaned the house, he paid the bills, he went into town to get the groceries, he made sure the furnace was working and called the guy if there was something wrong with it. Anything else that broke, he fixed it. If the lights went off, he went down and flipped the breakers to get them back on. Do you know where the breaker panel is, Thomas?”

  “The furnace works fine,” he said.

  “You don’t have a driver’s license,” I said. “How are you going to get food into the house?”

  “I’ll have it delivered,” he said.

  “We’re out in the middle of nowhere. And who’s going to actually go to the grocery store and pick out the things you like?”

  “You know what I like,” Thomas said.

  “But I won’t be here.”

  “You can come back,” he said. “Once a week, and get my food and pay the bills and see if the furnace is okay and then you can go back to Burlington.” He paused. “Vermont.”

  “What about each day? Let’s say you’ve got some food in the house. Are you going to be okay making your own meals?”

  Thomas looked away.

  I leaned in a little closer to him, reached out, and touched his arm. “Look at me,” I said. He turned his head back reluctantly.

  “Maybe,” I said, “if you made some changes in your routine, maybe you could take on some of these responsibilities yourself.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “Well, maybe you need to manage your time better.”

  He adopted a puzzled expression. “I manage my time very well.”

  I took my hand away and placed both palms down on the table. “Tell me about that.”

  “I do. I make very good use of my time.”

  “Describe your day for me.”

  “Which day? Like, a weekday, or the weekend?” He was stalling.

  “Would you say your Monday-to-Friday routine is very different from your weekend routine?”

  He thought on that. “I suppose not.”

  “Then any day would be fine. You pick.”

  Now he eyed me with suspicion. “Are you trying to make fun of me? Are you picking on me?”

  “You said you use your time wisely, so tell me.”

  “Well,” he said, “I get up around nine o’clock, and I have a shower, and then Dad makes me breakfast around nine thirty, and then I get to work.”

  “Work,” I said. “Tell me about that.”

  “You know,” he said.

  “I just don’t think I’ve heard you call it work before. Tell me about that.”

  “I go to work after breakfast, and I take a break for lunch, and then I go back to work until it’s dinnertime, and then I do some more work before I go to bed.”

  “And that’s around, what, one, two, three in the morning?”

  He nodded.

  “Tell me about the work.”

  “Why are you doing this, Ray?”

  “I guess I’m thinking if you spent a little less time on this work, as you call it, you’d be in a better position to look after yourself. Thomas, it’s no secret you’ve got issues you’ve been dealing with for a very long time, and that they’re ongoing, and I get that. Just like Dad and Mom did. And, compared to plenty of other people who have the same thing as you, who aren’t able to shut out the voices or deal with other symptoms, you manage very well. You get up, you dress yourself, you and I can sit here and have a rational conversation about things.”

  “I know,” Thomas said, somewhat indignantly. “I’m perfectly normal.”

  “But the amount of time you spend on your … work stands to interfere with your ability to look after this house on your own, or live here by yourself, and if you’re not able to do that, then we’re going to have to look at some other arrangement.”

  “What do you mean, another arrangement?”

  I hesitated. “Living somewhere else. Maybe an apartment, in town. Or, and this is something I’ve only just started looking into, some sort of housing where you’d live with other people with similar issues, where there are staff who look after things you can’t look after yourself.”

  “Why do you keep saying ‘issues’? I don’t have issues, Ray. I’ve had mental problems, which are very much under control. If you had arthritis, would you want me to say you had an issue with your bones?”

  “I’m sorry. I was just …” I didn’t know what to say.

  “Is this place where I would live a hospital? For crazy people?”

  “I never said you were crazy, Thomas.”

  “I don’t want to live in a hospital. The food’s terrible.” He looked at my unfinished meatloaf. “Even worse than that. And I don’t think a hospital room would have an Internet connection.”

  “Nobody’s talking about a hospital. But maybe some kind of, I don’t know, a kind of supervised house. You could probably do your own cooking. I could teach you how to do that.”

  “I can’t leave,” Thomas said matter-of-factly. “All my stuff is here. My work is here.”

  “Thomas, you spend all but an hour of your waking day on the computer, wandering all over the world. Day after day, month after month. It’s not healthy.”

  “It’s only a more recent development,” he said. “A few years ago, all I had was my maps and my atlases and my globe. There was no Whirl360. It’s so much better now. I’ve been waiting my whole life for something like this.”

  “You’ve always been obsessed with maps, but—”

  “Interested. I’ve always been interested in maps. I don’t say you’re obsessed with drawing silly pictures of people. I saw that one you did, of Obama, in the white coat with the stethoscope like he was a doctor, that ran in that magazine. I thought it made him look silly.”

  “That was the point,” I said. “That was what the magazine wanted.”

  “Well, would you call that an obsession? I think it’s just your job.”

  This wasn’t supposed to be about me. “This new technology,” I continued, “this Whirl360, has not been healthy for your interest in maps. You’re wandering down the streets of cities all over the world, which I grant you can be an interesting thing to do, but Thomas, you’re not doing anything else.”

  He looked down at the floor again.

  “Are you hearing me? You don’t go out. You don’t see people. You don’t read books or magazines. You don’t even watch television. You never come down and watch a movie.”

  “There’s nothing good on,” he said. “The movies are very poor. And they have so many mistakes in them. They’ll say they’re in New York, but you can tell from the background that it’s Toronto or Vancouver or some other place.”

  “All you do is sit at the computer and click your way down street after street after street. Listen, you want to see the world? Pick a city. I’ll take you to Tokyo. I’ll take you to Mumbai. You want to see Rome? We’ll go. We’ll sit in some restaurant by the Trevi Fountain and you can order some pizza or pasta and finish it off with some gelato and it’ll be the most fun you’ve ever had. You’ll be able to see the actual city instead of some static image of it on a computer screen. You’ll be able to touch these places, feel the bricks of Notre Dame under your fingertips, smell the Temple Street Night Market in Hong Kong, listen to karaoke in Tokyo. Pick a place and I’ll take you.”

  Thomas looked blankly at me. “No, I wouldn’t want to do that. I like it here just fine. I won’t catch any diseases, or lose my luggage, or end up in a hotel with bedbugs, or get mugged or get sick in a place where I can’t speak the language. And there’s not time.”

  “What do you
mean, not time?”

  “There’s not time to get every place in person. I can get it done here faster, get the work done.”

  “Thomas, what work?”

  “I can’t tell you,” he said. “I’ll have to check and see if it’s okay to tell you.”

  I let out a long sigh, ran my hand over the top of my head. I was exhausted. I decided to change the subject.

  “You remember Julie McGill? From school?”

  “Yes,” Thomas said. “What about her?”

  “She came to the funeral. She asked about you. Asked me to say hi.”

  Thomas looked at me, expectantly. “Are you going to say it?”

  “What?” Then I got it. “Hi. If you’d come to the service, she could have said it to you herself.” He didn’t react to that. His refusal to attend was still a sore point with me. “Was she in your class?”

  “No,” he said. “She was a year ahead of me, and a year behind you.” Thomas paused. “She lived at 34 Arbor Street, which is a two-story house with the door in the middle and windows on each side and three windows on the second floor and the house is painted green and there’s a chimney on the right side and the mailbox has flowers stenciled on it. She was always nice to me. Is she still pretty?”

  I nodded. “Yeah. Her hair’s still black but it’s short now.”

  “Does she still have a bod?” He asked this without a hint of lasciviousness, like he wanted to know whether she was still driving a Subaru.

  “I would say yes,” I said. “Did you guys … did you have a thing?”

  “A thing?” He really didn’t know.

  “Did you go out?”

  “No,” he said. I could have guessed. Thomas had never had a steady girlfriend, and had only gone on dates a handful of times that I could remember. His odd, inward nature didn’t help, but I was never all that sure he cared about girls to begin with. Back when I was hiding skin mags under the mattress, Thomas was already amassing his huge map collection.

  “But I liked her,” Thomas said. “She rescued me.”

  I cocked my head, trying to recall. “That time, with the Landry twins?”

  Thomas nodded. He’d been walking home from school when Skyler and Stan Landry, a couple of bullies with the combined IQ of a bucket of primer, had blocked his path and taunted him about how he talked to himself in class. They were starting to push him around when Julie McGill showed up.