House Rules Read online

  He glances down at the page. --It says SOLVED: ME.||

  --Anything else notable about that line?||

  Matson looks at the jury. --It's underlined. Ten times.||

  Theo

  At dinner, I'm the one who sees my brother stealing the knife.

  I don't say anything at first. But it's perfectly clear to me, the way he pauses in the middle of his yellow rice and scrambled eggs to carve the kernels off an ear of corn--and then pushes the knife with his thumbs to the edge of the table, so that it falls into his lap.

  My mother yammers on about the trial--about the coffee machine at the courthouse which only dispenses cold coffee; about what Jacob is going to wear tomorrow; about the defense, which will present its case in the morning. I don't think either of us is listening, because Jacob is trying to not move his shoulders while he wraps the knife in a napkin and I am trying to study his every move.

  When he starts to get up from the table and my mother cuts him off with a sharp, forced cough, I am sure she's going to call him on his stolen cutlery. But instead, she says, --Aren't you forgetting something?||

  --May I be excused?|| Jacob mutters, and a minute later he's scraped his plate and heads upstairs.

  --I wonder what's the matter,|| my mother says. --He hardly ate.||

  I shovel the rest of my food into my mouth and then mumble a request to be excused. I hurry upstairs, but Jacob's not in his room. The bathroom door is wide open, too.

  It's like he's just vanished.

  I walk into my own bedroom, and all of a sudden I'm grabbed and pulled against the wall, and there's a knife at my throat.

  Okay, I'm just going to say it's pretty depressing that this is not the first time I've found myself in this scenario with my brother. I do what I know works: I bite his wrist.

  You'd think he'd see it coming, but he doesn't; the knife clatters to the floor, and I elbow him in his soft gut. He doubles over, grunting. --What the fuck are you doing?|| I yell.

  --Practicing.||

  I reach for the knife and stick it inside my desk drawer, the one I keep locked, where I've learned to keep the things I don't want Jacob to get. --Practicing murder?|| I say.

  --You crazy motherfucker. This is why you're going to get convicted.||

  --I wasn't going to actually hurt you.|| Jacob sits down heavily on my bed. --There was someone looking at me funny today.||

  --I'd think a lot of people in that courtroom were looking at you funny.||

  --But this one guy followed me to the bathroom. I have to be able to protect myself.||

  --Right. And what do you think is going to happen tomorrow morning when you walk into the courthouse and the metal detectors start beeping? And the stupid reporters all watch you pull a steak knife out of your sock?||

  He frowns. This is one of those harebrained Aspie schemes of his, the ones he never thinks through. Like when he called the cops on my mom two months ago. To Jacob, I'm sure it seemed perfectly logical. To the rest of the free world, not so much.

  --What if there's nothing wrong with me?|| Jacob says. --What if the reason I act like I do and think like I do is that I'm left out all the time? If I had friends, you know, maybe I wouldn't do things that look strange to everyone else. It's like bacteria that only grows in a vacuum. Maybe there's no such thing as Asperger's. Maybe all there is is what happens to you when you don't fit in.||

  --Don't go telling your lawyer that. He needs Asperger's to exist big-time right now.|| I look at Jacob's hands. His cuticles are bitten down to the skin; often he draws blood. My mother used to have to wrap Band-Aids around all his fingers before she sent him to school. Once, in the hallways, I heard two girls calling him the Mummy. --Hey, Jacob,|| I say quietly. --I'll tell you something no one else knows.||

  His hand flutters on his thigh. --A secret?||

  --Yeah. But you can't tell Mom.||

  I want to tell him. I've wanted to tell someone for so long now. But maybe Jacob is right: in the absence of having space in the world, the thing that's left behind just gets bigger and more unrecognizable. It swells in my throat; it steals all the air in the room. And suddenly, I'm blubbering like a baby; I'm wiping my eyes with my sleeves and trying to pretend that my brother isn't in court; my brother isn't going to jail; that this isn't karmic payment for all the bad things I've done and all the bad thoughts I've had.

  --I was there,|| I blurt out. --I was there the day Jess died.||

  Jacob doesn't look at me, and maybe that's easier. He flutters his hand a little faster and then brings it up to his throat. --I know,|| he says.

  My eyes widen. --You do?||

  --Of course I do. I saw your footprints.|| He stares just over my shoulder. --That's why I had to do it.||

  Oh my God. She told Jacob that I'd been spying on her naked and that she was going to go to the cops, and he shut her up. Now I'm sobbing; I can barely catch my breath.

  --I'm sorry.||

  He doesn't touch me or hug me or comfort me, the way my mom would. The way any other human would. Jacob just keeps fanning his fingers, and then he says I'm sorry I'm sorry like I did, an echo that's been stripped of its music, like rain on tin.

  It's prosody. It's part of Asperger's. When Jacob was little, he would repeat questions I asked and throw them back at me like a baseball pitch instead of answering. My mother told me this was like his movie quotes, a verbal stim. It was Jacob's way of feeling the words in his mouth when he had nothing to say in return.

  But all the same, I let myself pretend it's his robotic, monotone way of asking for my forgiveness, too.

  Jacob

  That day when we come home from court, instead of watching CrimeBusters, I choose a different video instead. It is a home movie of me when I was a baby, only one year old. It must be my birthday because there is a cake, and I am clapping and smiling and saying things like Mama and Dada and milk. Every time someone says my name I look up, right into the camera.

  I look normal.

  My parents are happy. My dad's there, and he's not even in any videos we have of Theo. My mother doesn't have the line between her eyes that she has now. Most people take home movies, after all, to capture something they want to remember, not a moment they'd rather forget.

  That's not the case later on in the video. All of a sudden, instead of sticking my fingers in a cake and offering up a big gummy smile, I'm rocking in front of the washing machine, watching the clothes turn in circles. I'm lying in front of the television, but instead of watching the programming, I'm lining up Lego pieces end to end. My father isn't in the film anymore; instead there are people I don't know--a woman with frizzy yellow hair and a sweatshirt with a cat on it who gets down on the floor with me and moves my head so that I focus on a puzzle she's set down. A lady with bright blue eyes is having a conversation with me, if you can call it that: Lady: Jacob, are you excited about going to the circus?

  Me: Yes.

  Lady: What do you want to see at the circus?

  Me: (No answer)

  Lady: Say, At the circus, I want to see ...

  Me: I want to see clowns.

  Lady (gives me an M&M): I love clowns. Are you excited about the circus?

  Me: Yeah, I want to see clowns.

  Lady (gives me three M&M's): Jacob, that's great!

  Me: (I stuff the M&M's into my mouth)

  These are the movies my mother took as evidence, as proof that I was now a different child than the one she'd started with. I don't know what she was thinking when she recorded them. Surely she didn't want to sit and watch all this over and over, the visual equivalent of a slap in the face. Maybe she was keeping them in the hope that one day a pharmaceutical executive might arrive unexpectedly for dinner, watch the tapes, and cut her a check for damages.

  As I'm watching, there's a sudden streak of silver static that makes me cover my ears, and then there's another segment of video. It's been accidentally taped over my Oscar-worthy autistic toddler film, and in it I am much older. It is only a y