Barclay, Linwood Novel 08 - Never saw it coming

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.