Switching tack I ask, “Can I help?”
Like my father, Toby responds as if I’ve said nothing at all. “You better go on inside.”
Then he scrapes his brush along the side of the paint can and presses its bristles to the window. With his customary precision, he coats the glass from frame to frame without getting a speck of paint on the trim.
It is the middle of the night and I can’t sleep. I’m still not used to having the room to myself. Toby’s absence is a hole I fear I’ll be dragged into. I leave my bed and go to the window and stare down on Daddy’s workshop, and the dark building with its black windows makes me think of a haunted house, and I think my brother is the phantom prowling it. Daddy’s truck is parked only a few feet from the door. He’s back from Dallas. I don’t remember having heard him come home.
After I tire of looking at the workshop, I leave the window and then leave my room and wander down the hall to the stairs. Though I’ve made no conscious decision about where I’m going, I creep downstairs and detect a muffled clicking sound that draws me to the kitchen. Daddy sits at the table under the cone of light falling from the hanging brass fixture, bent over a box with a number of colored wires snaking from its side. A brown paper bag rests to his left. Next to this is the slide projector Mama bought at the flea market in Bastrop. She’d never used it so far as I knew, but she’d been very proud of “the deal” she’d found at the time, and I wonder why Daddy has scavenged the device from the hall closet.
He looks up and fixes grim eyes on me. The overhead light casts shadows down his face, and the dark patches beneath his eyes and chin, and the lines around his mouth look like blotches of rot. A stricken quality passes over his face, and he blinks, and I wonder if he recognizes me at all. He puts down his screwdriver and rubs his eyes and I again think he looks as if he hasn’t slept since Mr. Mannheim’s call all those days ago. His hair is greasy and flat and the skin on his face hangs as if the muscles beneath have relinquished their grasp.
“Peter,” he says quietly. He reaches out and lifts the brown paper bag from the tabletop and lowers it to the floor beside his feet. “You shouldn’t be up.”
“Did you have a good trip to Dallas?”
“Fine,” he says dryly.
I think to ask if he’s found anything that will help Toby, but the expression on his face, empty of all but flickers of life, warns me away from the question. So I stand there silently, following the trajectory of the wires poking from the metal box before him, and I look back to the slide projector sitting like a turtle near the edge of the table, and I take in the spools of wire and the cutters and a box with the word rheostat stenciled across its oatmeal-colored cardboard box.
“You should be in bed,” he says.
“Maybe I could help.”
“Get your ass to bed, Peter!”
The following day, I see neither Daddy nor Toby, but when I’m outside playing in the yard, kicking a ball across the scrub grass and dirt, I hear evidence of their presence in the workshop. Whispers. The clicking of tools. At one point, I kick my ball toward the back wall of the workshop and press my ear close to the blackened window. The glass muffles Daddy’s voice, but I recognize his tone, and I realize he is doing all of the talking. I want to hear the words but they are garbled and incomprehensible like prayers spoken under water.
I imagine my father and brother hunched over the slide projector and various electrical wires and components. Daddy might be pointing at a device and a wire and explaining why the two must be joined in a specific way, and I think Toby is lucky to be spending so much time with Daddy. A tickle of jealousy joins my curiosity, and for a time I forget that Toby is being punished, or that he’s not well. I still don’t understand his condition, but I know I want to join them in the workshop, to be part of the project. Resting my foot on the red ball, I look around the yard, searching for an excuse to knock on the workshop door. But instead of finding a magic key that will justify my intrusion, I see Mama standing at the corner of the house. Her arms are crossed, and she frowns at me.
Later that night, I’m watching television. It is near my bedtime. Mama has given me a plate of two cookies and a small glass of milk to enjoy while Carol Burnett and her co-stars stumble and mug for the camera.
Just as a skit is about to end, the lights in my house dim and the television screen goes green-black in a hiccup of electric current. I think little of it. Such hiccups are common during storms or high winds. But it isn’t storming, and I hear no gusts in the eaves. A roar of laughter, harsh and mocking, pours from the television when it comes back on, and I feel a chill. A minute later, the lights flicker off again.
Vast stretches of darkness gave way to the occasional streetlamp. Driving toward my childhood home, I attempted to shake off the memories, hoping to loosen the tightness in my chest, but the program in my head was nearing an end, and I didn’t have a switch to turn it off, not even a rheostat to adjust its power.
What I remembered clearly was that things in our house seemed to return to normal after the night of the flickering lights. The next morning, I found Toby at the breakfast table. He appeared exhausted and confused, but his fatigue didn’t seem quite so dire. He wore a clean white t-shirt and a baseball cap, which he’d pulled low on his brow. Mama had fixed pancakes and bacon and Toby tore through them. My father joined us. Unlike Toby, he barely ate. His exhaustion remained, and he smoked cigarettes through the meal, blowing smoke onto his plate, as if in a trance.
Nothing was said about Toby or the workshop or what they had constructed within it, but apparently the experiment had done some good, because for the first time in a week, Toby slept in our room. He went to school on Monday, and when he came home he let himself into the workshop, where he would stay for an hour. And then supper. And then to bed. The spark in his eyes had not returned, and he wore his baseball cap everywhere, somehow eluding Mama’s rule about hats at the dining table, which also distressed me because it wasn’t usual, but he was back in the house and things had reached a level of normality. And I started to believe the darkness that had tarnished our golden boy was finally being wiped away.
A week before Christmas, my father had his first aneurism. It didn’t kill him, that would take six more years and two more “cerebral events,” but that night, he died some in my eyes, because I saw what he’d built. I discovered his answer to my brother’s troubles.
After my mother’s tears and my father’s expression of perplexed misery, and after the paramedics and the ambulance, and after the red lights vanish over the hill and the front door closes behind me, I trudge to the sofa and fall onto it. Toby is already there, staring at the television; both his face and the appliance screen are dark.
“Do you think Daddy’s going to die, Toby?”
“No,” he snaps. His gaze doesn’t wander from the blank-glass nothing of the TV. “He can’t.”
“He looked real bad.”
“He’s a great man, Petey. He’s strong. He’ll be okay.”
And I know Toby is not stating a fact; he is voicing a wish.
“But what if he’s not?” I ask.