House Rules: A Novel Read online

  Everyone always talks about the proverbial icicle—stab someone and the murder weapon will melt—but it’s a long shot (a) that you will be able to grip that icicle long enough to inflict a wound and (b) that it won’t break off when it hits the skin before puncturing it. Mescaline sprinkled over someone’s salad would be subtler—the brown powder would be virtually indistinguishable mixed with vinaigrette, and you wouldn’t taste the bitter flavor, especially if there was chicory or arugula in the mix. But what if you only made your victim have a bad trip instead of die, and plus, where would you get your stash? You could take someone sailing and shove him overboard, preferably after getting him drunk, and say he fell accidentally—but then, you would need to have a boat. A mix of Vicodin and alcohol would slow the heart excessively, but your victim would have to pretty much be a party animal for a detective to not find that suspicious. I’ve heard of people who try to burn down a house after committing murder, but that never really works. The arson inspectors can trace where the fire started. Plus, a body has to be charred beyond recognition—and dental work—to not point a finger back at you. I wouldn’t recommend anything that leaves blood, either. It’s messy; you’ll need lots of bleach to clean it, and there’s bound to still be a drop left behind.

  The conundrum of the perfect crime is complicated, because getting away with murder has very little to do with the mechanism of the killing and everything to do with what you do before and after. The only way to really cover a crime is to not tell a soul. Not your wife, not your mother, not your priest. And, of course, you have to have killed the right kind of person—someone who isn’t going to be looked for. Someone who nobody wants to see again.

  Theo

  Once, a girl came up to me in the cafeteria and asked me if I wanted to go to Jesus Camp. You will be saved, she told me, and man, I was tempted. I mean, it’s been pretty clear to me for a while that I’m going to hell, because of all the secret thoughts I’m not supposed to have about Jacob.

  You always read these books about kids who have autistic siblings and who are constantly looking out for them, who love them to death, who do a better job defusing their tantrums than the adults. Well, I’m not one of those people. Sure, when Jacob used to wander off I’d feel sick in the pit of my stomach, but it wasn’t because I was worried about him. It was because I had to be an awful brother to be thinking what I was: Maybe he’ll never be found, and I can get on with my life.

  I used to have dreams that my brother was normal. You know, that we could fight about ordinary things, like whose turn it was to control the television remote, or who got to ride shotgun in the car. But I was never allowed to fight with Jacob. Not when I’d forget to lock my bedroom door and he came in and stole my CDs for some forensics project; not when we were little and he’d walk around the table at my birthday party, eating cake off the plates of my friends. My mother said it was a house rule, and she explained it like this: Jacob’s different from the rest of us. Gee, you think? And by the way, since when does being different net you a free pass in life?

  The problem is, Jacob’s difference doesn’t confine itself to Jacob. It’s like the time my mother’s red shirt bled in the wash and turned all my clothes pink: my brother’s Asperger’s has made me different, too. I could never have friends over, because what if Jacob had a meltdown? If I thought it was weird to see my brother peeing on the heater to watch steam rise, what the hell would someone from school think? That I was a freak, no doubt, by association.

  True confession number one: When I’m walking down the hall in school and I see Jacob at the other end of the corridor, I intentionally divert my path to avoid him.

  True confession number two: Once, when a bunch of kids from another school started making fun of Jacob as he attempted to play kickball—a hot mess if ever there was one—I pretended that I didn’t know him; I laughed along, too.

  True confession number three: I truly believe that I have it worse than Jacob, because he’s oblivious most of the time to the fact that people want nothing to do with him; but I am one hundred percent aware that they’re all looking at me and thinking, Oh, that’s the bizarre kid’s brother.

  True confession number four: I don’t sit around thinking about having kids, normally, but when I do it scares the shit out of me. What if my own son winds up being like Jacob? I’ve already spent my whole childhood dealing with autism; I don’t know if I can handle doing it for the rest of my life.

  Any time I think of one of these things, I feel like crap. I’m pretty much useless: not Jacob’s parent, and not one of his teachers. I’m just here as the benchmark alternative, so that my mother can look from Jacob to me and measure the distance between an AS kid and a so-called normal one.

  When that girl asked me to go to Jesus Camp, I asked her if Jesus was going to be there. She looked confused, and then said no. Well, I said, isn’t that a little like going to hockey camp and not playing hockey? As I walked away, the girl told me Jesus loved me.

  How do you know? I asked.

  Once, after Jacob had raged through my room like a tropical storm and destroyed most of what was important to me, my mother came in to commiserate. Deep down, he loves you, she told me.

  How do you know? I asked.

  I don’t, she admitted. But it’s what I have to believe to keep going.

  I’ve looked in my jacket, my pants. I’ve scoured the driveway. But I can’t find the iPod, and that means it’s lost somewhere between here and her house.

  What if she knows I tried to take it?

  What if she tells someone?

  * * *

  By the time I get home from school, life is back to normal. My mother is typing away on her laptop at the kitchen table, and Jacob is in his room with the door closed. I make myself ramen noodles and eat them in my room with Coldplay blasting as I do my French homework.

  My mother’s always telling me I can’t listen to music when I do my homework. Once, she barged in and accused me of not working on my English paper when it was what I’d been doing all along. How good could it possibly be, she said, if you’re not concentrating?

  I told her to sit down and read the stupid paper on my computer.

  She did, and shut up pretty quickly. I got an A on that project, as I recall.

  I guess that somehow the gene pool in our family got all mixed up, and as a result, Jacob can only focus on one thing, an extreme obsession, while I can do sixteen thousand things at a time.

  When I finish my homework I’m still hungry, so I go downstairs. My mother is nowhere to be found—and there’s no freaking food in the house, for a change (not)—but I notice Jacob sitting in the living room. I look up at the clock, but I hardly have to—if it’s 4:30 in our house, it must be CrimeBusters.

  I hesitate at the doorway, watching him pore over his notebooks. Half of me is ready to slink away without being seen by Jacob, but the other half remembers what he looked like this morning. In spite of all I’ve said about wishing he was never born, seeing him like that—like the light had gone out inside him, sort of—made me feel like I’d been punched over and over in the gut.

  What if I’d been born first, and was the one who wound up with Asperger’s? Would he be standing here wishing I wouldn’t notice him, too?

  Before I can even let myself get good and guilty, Jacob starts talking. He doesn’t look at me—he never does—but that probably means all his other senses are more finely tuned. “It’s episode twenty-two today,” he says, as if we have been in the middle of a conversation. “An oldie but a goodie.”

  “How many times have you seen this one?” I ask.

  He glances down at his notebook. “Thirty-eight.”

  I’m not a huge fan of CrimeBusters. In the first place, I think the acting is bad. In the second place, this has to be the richest CSI lab ever, with all its bells and whistles. Something tells me that the fuming chamber at the state lab in Vermont looks a lot more like Jacob’s duct-taped old fish tank than the CrimeBusters version, wh