House Rules: A Novel Read online

  Theo

  I was nine when my mother made me go to a therapy group for siblings of autistic kids. There were only four of us—two girls with faces that looked like ground over a sinkhole, who had a baby sister who apparently never stopped screaming; a boy whose twin was severely autistic; and me. We all had to go around a circle and say one thing we loved about our sibling, and one thing we really hated.

  The girls went first. They said they hated the way the baby kept them up all night, but they liked the fact that her first word had not been Mama or Dada but instead Sissy. Then I went. I said that I hated when Jacob took my stuff without asking and how it was okay for him to interrupt me to give some dinosaur fact nobody cared about but that if I interrupted him he’d get really angry and have a meltdown. I liked the way he said things, sometimes, that were hilarious—even though they weren’t meant to be—like when a camp counselor told him swimming would be a piece of cake and he freaked out because he thought he’d have to eat underwater and surely would drown. Then it was the other boy’s turn. But before he could speak the door burst open and his twin brother ran inside and sat down on his lap. The kid reeked—and I mean reeked. All of a sudden their mom poked her head into the room. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “Harry doesn’t like anyone but Stephen to change his diaper.”

  Sucks to be Stephen, I thought. But instead of getting totally embarrassed, like I would have been, or pissed off, like I also would have been, Stephen just laughed and hugged his brother. “Let’s go,” he said, and he held his twin’s hand and led him out of the room.

  We did other stuff that day with the therapist, but I wasn’t concentrating. I couldn’t get out of my head the image of nine-year-old Harry wearing a giant diaper, of Stephen cleaning up the messes. There was one more thing I liked about my own sibling with autism: he was potty-trained.

  At our lunch break, I found myself gravitating toward Stephen. He was sitting by himself, eating apple slices from a plastic bag.

  “Hey,” I said, climbing into the seat next to him.

  “Hey.”

  I opened the straw of my juice pack and poked it into the cardboard box. I stared out the window, trying to figure out what he was looking at.

  “So how do you do it?” I asked, after a minute.

  He didn’t pretend to misunderstand. He picked an apple slice out of the bag, chewed it, swallowed. “It could have been me,” he said.

  Mama Spatakopoulous can’t fit into the witness chair. She has to push and wedge, and finally the judge asks the bailiff to get a seat that might be more comfortable. If it were me up there, I’d want to hide under the stupid chair in embarrassment, but she seems to be perfectly happy. Maybe she thinks it’s a testimonial to how good her food is.

  “Mrs. Spatakopoulous, where do you work?” asks the Dragon Bitch, a.k.a. Helen Sharp.

  “Call me Mama.”

  The prosecutor looks at the judge, who shrugs. “Mama, then. Where do you work?”

  “I own Mama S’s Pizzeria, on Main Street in Townsend.”

  “How long have you run the restaurant?”

  “Fifteen years this June. Best pizza in Vermont. You come by, I’ll give you a free sample.”

  “That’s very generous of you … Mama, were you working the afternoon of January tenth, 2010?”

  “I work every afternoon,” she says proudly.

  “Did you know Jess Ogilvy?”

  “Yes, she was a regular. Good girl, with a good head on her shoulders. Helped me salt the walkway once after an ice storm because she didn’t want me to throw my back out.”

  “Did you speak to her on January tenth?”

  “I waved to her when she came in, but it was a madhouse.”

  “Was she alone?”

  “No, she came with her boyfriend, and the kid she tutored.”

  “Do you see that kid in the courtroom today?”

  Mama S. blows my brother a kiss.

  “Had you ever seen Jacob before January tenth?”

  “Once or twice, he came in with his mama to get pizza. Got celiac problems, like my father, God rest his soul.”

  “Did you talk to Jacob Hunt that afternoon?” the prosecutor asks.

  “Yes. By the time I brought the pizzas they had ordered, he was sitting alone at the table.”

  “Do you know why Jacob Hunt was sitting alone?” Helen Sharp asks.

  “Well, they were all fighting. The boyfriend was angry at Jacob, Jess was angry at the boyfriend for being angry at Jacob, and then the boyfriend left.” She shakes her head. “Then Jess got angry at Jacob, and she left.”

  “Did you hear what they were fighting about?”

  “I had eighteen take-out orders to fill; I wasn’t listening. The only thing I heard was what Jess said, before she left.”

  “Which was what, Mama S.?”

  The woman purses her lips. “She told him to get lost.”

  The prosecutor sits back down, and then it is Oliver’s turn. I don’t watch cop shows. I don’t really watch anything, unless it’s CrimeBusters, since Jacob hogs the TV. But being in court is kind of like watching a basketball game—one side scores, and then the other takes the ball back and scores, and this goes on and on. And just like basketball, I bet it all comes down to the last five minutes.

  “So you really don’t know what the argument was about,” Oliver says.

  “No.” She leans forward. “Oliver, you look very handsome in your fancy suit.”

  He smiles, but it looks a little painful. “Thanks, Mama. So, you were in fact paying attention to your customers.”

  “I’ve got to make a living, don’t I?” she says, and then she shakes her head. “You’re losing weight, I think. You’ve been eating out too much. Constantine and I are both worried about you …”

  “Mama, I kind of need to get through this?” he whispers.

  “Oh. All right.” She turns to the jury. “I didn’t hear the argument.”

  “You were behind the counter?”

  “Yes.”

  “Near the ovens.”

  “Yes.”

  “And there were other people working around you?”

  “Three, that day.”

  “And there was noise?”

  “The phone, and the pinball, and the jukebox were all going.”

  “So you’re not really sure what upset Jess in the first place?”

  “No.”

  Oliver nods. “When Jacob was sitting alone, did you talk to him?”

  “I tried. He wasn’t big on conversation.”

  “Did he ever make eye contact with you?”

  “No.”

  “Did he do anything threatening?”

  Mama S. shakes her head. “No, he’s a good boy. I just left him alone,” she says. “It seemed to be what he wanted.”

  My whole life, Jacob’s wanted to be part of the group. This is one of the reasons why I never brought friends home. My mother would have insisted we include Jacob, and frankly, that would have pretty much guaranteed the end of the friendship for me. (The other reason is I was embarrassed. I didn’t want anyone to know what my household was like; I didn’t want to have to explain Jacob’s antics, because even though my mother insisted they were just quirks of his, to the rest of the free world, they looked freaking ridiculous.)

  Every now and then, though, Jacob managed to infiltrate my separate life, which was even worse. It was the social equivalent of when I once built a house of cards using all fifty-two of them and Jacob thought it would be funny to poke it with his fork.

  In elementary school I was a total social outcast because of Jacob, but when we got to middle school, there were people from other towns who didn’t know about my brother with Asperger’s. Through some miracle I managed to become friends with two guys named Tyler and Wally, who lived in South Burlington and played Ultimate Frisbee. They invited me to play after school, and when I told them sure and didn’t have to even call my mom to check if it was okay, that only made me seem cooler. I