Free I Know This Much Is True by Wally Lamb Page A

library.
    “Dominick?” Thomas called up to the front.
    “Hmm?”
    “How much longer?”
    “We’re about halfway.”
    Three Rivers State Hospital is on the southern border of town, a left turn off the John Mason Parkway, the four-lane state highway that runs to the Connecticut shoreline. Once part of the hunting and fishing grounds of the Wequonnoc Indians, the sprawling hospital property is bordered behind by the Sachem River, on the north by the town fairgrounds, and on the south by the sacred burial grounds of the Wequonnocs. Back in the summer of ’69, Thomas and I mowed and trimmed that little Indian graveyard. We were seasonal employees, home from our freshman year at college. By then, Thomas’s illness had I Know[001-115] 7/24/02 12:21 PM Page 50
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    WALLY LAMB
    already started flirting with him in little ways I couldn’t or didn’t want to see. Nine months later, there’d be no avoiding it: March of 1970 was when Thomas’s brain dropped him to his knees.
    It was hard to believe over twenty years had gone by between that crazy summer and this ride in the police cruiser. I’d graduated from college, taught high school history for a while, and then started my painting business. Ma had died, and the baby. Dessa had left me; I’d hooked up with Joy. Now here I was, after all that water under the bridge, still riding back with my brother to the state hospital. There’d been two decades’ worth of shifting diagnoses, new medications, exchangeable state-appointed shrinks. We’d long since given up on miracles for Thomas, settling instead for reasonable intervals between the bad spells and ugly episodes. Seventy-seven and ’78 were good years, I remember. That’s when they decided Thomas wasn’t manic-depressive after all, took him off lithium, and started him on Stelazine instead. Then Dr. Bradbury retired and Thomas’s new guy, that fucking little Dr. Schooner, decided that if six milligrams of Stelazine a day was good for my brother, eighteen milligrams a day would be even better. I can still feel that little quack’s tweed coat lapels in my fists the day I went down to see Thomas and found him sitting there paralyzed and glassy-eyed, his tongue sticking out of his mouth, his shirt front sopping with drool. Schooner had meant to check in on my brother, he told me after I let him go, but it had been so busy. He’d had to cover for another doctor; his in-laws were in town. One of the nurses told me they’d called that slimeball and left messages about Thomas all weekend long.
    There was a pretty good stretch in the early eighties. Dr. Filyaw started Thomas on Haldol in 1983. My brother began doing so well that they transferred him to a group home and got him that maintenance job at McDonald’s. (Thomas had me photocopy his first paycheck before we cashed it, I remember. He kept it framed on his bedroom wall at the group home, along with a ten-dollar bill that somebody stole later on to buy cigarettes.) Thomas even had himself a girlfriend back then, this bride-of-Frankenstein chick named Nadine. Nadine was a holy roller like him but not nuts in any offi-

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    cial way. Not categorized as crazy. They met in a Bible study group.
    She was in her midforties, a good ten years older than he was at the time. Don’t ask me how they squared it with God and their holy roller group, but my brother and Nadine were doing it. I should know. I’m the guy who had to buy Thomas his Trojans. It was Nadine who convinced him that if his faith was strong enough, he didn’t have to rely on medication—that what God wanted from him was a test of faith.
    It’s tempting to delude yourself when your screwed-up brother becomes gainfully employed and starts acting less screwed up for a while. You begin to take sanity for granted—convince yourself that optimism’s in order. Thomas had a girlfriend and a job and was living semi-independently. If the signs