Gigi Sinclair

When there was no answer to his knock, Angus automatically assumed the worst. They'd worried it might come to this, especially when Tobias refused counselling. Steeling himself, Angus slipped his emergency key into the lock, relieved it was he, and not Mother or Grandmother, who was going to find the body.

Toby being Toby, Angus expected a self-indulgent suicide scene, probably complete with crown of thorns or overly symbolic equivalent. Instead, Angus found his brother very much alive and sitting on a brand new couch, writing on a legal pad. A, more usual, flash of irritation quickly tempered Angus's initial relief and he asked, as calmly as possible: "Didn't you hear me knock?"

"What?" Toby glanced up, then back at his page. "Oh. Sorry. No."

"What are you doing?"

"Writing to Chris."

He can read? Was Angus's automatic response, but he bit it back just as automatically. It wasn't a good idea to start with that, not if he wanted to have some kind of semi-rational conversation with Toby. Toby had always been, for want of a better word, snippy, and he'd been even snippier since he'd come home on parole.

"I see." Angus, on the other hand, had always been the calm one, the peacemaker. He sat down peaceably across from Toby, on some godawful leatherette chair Toby had picked up somewhere, and looked at his brother. "I've been meaning to talk to you about...that."

"Right. Of course." Toby didn't stop writing. "Because he's sub-human, whatever I felt for him couldn't possibly be any kind of real emotion, and now that I've escaped his evil clutches, I should pretend the last few years never happened and get on with my life. I already heard it from Dad." Now, Toby looked up, and once again Angus couldn't get over how skinny he'd become. Angus had always been the athlete, the yacht club and varsity basketball guy. Toby had been the chubby chess club geek with the glasses. "Several times, in fact, so I'm well aware of the party line, thanks anyway."

"I wasn't going to say that." Angus rubbed his hands on his Gabardine slacks, not sure when he'd become so nervous around his big brother. Actually, Angus thought, that wasn't quite true. He knew when it had started. Not when Toby went to prison, not when he got parole, but when he started to act like a condemned serial killer was more important to him than his own family. "I don't know what it was like in there."

Angus had tried to imagine, several times. Lying in his antique four-poster bed, sometimes with a blonde socialite or a cute young paralegal by his side, Angus had tried to picture just how lonely his brother must have been. To envision just how far you would have to sink into your own misery and pain before any guy who was, from what Toby had said, kind of friendly and not so bad to look at would seem like a dream come true. Angus couldn't begin to fathom it.

"Of course you fucking don't, Angus." That was new, too. Before, Toby, like Angus, had never said anything stronger than an occasional "shit" and that only in the company of certain people. Now, Toby talked like a sailor---or a common criminal---all the time. According to a very shocked Grandmother, Toby had even used the "f-word, Angus darling, you know which one I mean" when he was speaking to her.

Still, Toby was his brother, and Angus wanted to help him through this. It was his job. "Toby, do you remember that summer I spent with Aunt Mimi in the Hamptons?" Toby blinked at him, like he was speaking a foreign language. Angus pressed on. "You went to Europe with some guys from Harvard." And, at the time, the adolescent Angus had definitely thought Toby was getting the better deal, but what else was new? "Anyway, Aunt Mimi had this housekeeper." Maria de Guadalupe, Angus remembered that very clearly, although Aunt Mimi always called her Lupe, and she pronounced it "Loopy", like it was an insult. Like, Angus thought, Toby was acting these days.

Lupe was young and beautiful, with thick dark hair and a bracelet that caught the sunlight when she dusted Aunt Mimi's collected works of Dickens. Lupe was so different from the prune-faced old Mrs. O'Connor his parents employed that Angus could hardly believe they belonged to the same sex, let alone held the same menial job. Lupe was far smarter than Mrs. O'Connor, though. She didn't speak much English, but what she had, combined with Angus's A-plus high school Spanish (not that anyone had noticed his grades, bowled over as they were by every little detail of Toby's gin-soaked Harvard experience) was enough to make a very memorable summer.

"I was in love with her." Completely, madly, passionately. They didn't do anything, of course, because Lupe was engaged to some under-gardener or shoeshine boy or something and Angus wasn't Toby, but Angus spent the entire summer chastely worshipping her. Their last day together, Lupe picked a flower from the garden and put it into Angus's lapel, and he kept it for years afterwards. Not that anyone knew that. "But it couldn't have worked."

"How very touching." Toby snorted. "Did Aunt Mimi know you were shafting the help? I wouldn't think so, but then she was such a frigid old bitch I don't suppose the thought ever crossed her mind."

Angus frowned. "I'm trying to draw a parallel here."

That got Toby's attention, at least. He put the paper and the pen down on the coffee table. "And what parallel would that be, Angus?"

"That maybe you do love this man," the words were harder to choke out than liberal, unprejudiced, "live and let live" Angus would have ever expected, "but that doesn't mean you can be together. Things don't always work out the way we want them to."

Toby's face twisted itself into a vicious sneer Angus hadn't seen before. "Oh, I see. You're comparing your little Ryan O'Neal moment with Aunt Mimi's maid to the love of my fucking life. Well, thanks for the effort, buddy." Angus knew he was blushing when Toby's sneer became even more pronounced. "That's sweet. You know, Chris likes that in a guy. You'd be amazed at how far a little blushing got me. Or maybe you wouldn't be."

Angus stood up. Family peacemaker or not, he wasn't about to sit here and take abuse. Toby, though, kept talking as if Angus hadn't moved. "He noticed you, too, when you visited me once. Told me how cute he thought you were. At the time, I thought it was a mindfuck, but maybe not entirely." His gaze slid from Angus's feet to his face and back again, and Angus felt his skin crawl. "I don't share," Toby went on. By this time, Angus knew, if he'd doubted it before, that his brother had died back in Oswald. This was a stranger, a scary criminal freak, not the same person who'd taught Angus to ride a bike and make paper airplanes and play chess when their father was too busy to take the time.

It took all of Angus's self-control to sound reasonably calm as he asked: "Are you coming with me to Mother and Dad's or not?" He hoped Toby would say no, but instead, Toby smiled suddenly and jumped up, like he'd just been talking about the weather.

"Sure, Angus. I even picked up a blueberry pie for dessert. Holly always loved blueberries." He disappeared into the kitchen and Angus sat back down in the chair, unsure whether he should laugh, cry, or call that imbecile McManus and get Toby back in prison. He was Angus's brother, his own flesh and blood, but he was clearly insane, something their parents never seemed to see. Didn't want to see.

As he heard Toby moving around the tiny apartment kitchen, Angus turned his head and looked at the precise, still-lawyerly writing on the legal pad. He knew he shouldn't read it, but part of Angus wanted to know what someone like Toby, someone who'd seen everything and done a lot, could possibly have in common with a man who had spent his life going from juvenile prisons to halfway houses to Lardner to Oswald.

Keeping an eye out for Toby, Angus skimmed over the letter. It started the way Angus would have expected. Toby told Keller he missed him, that he was working hard on the appeal, that Toby "couldn't sleep without the sound of Chris on the bunk beneath him and the smell of him on the sheets." Angus felt himself reddening again and skipped the next paragraph, until he saw his name.

"The best part," Toby wrote, "About being out is seeing my kids again. The worst is seeing Angus and knowing what he must think of me. I sometimes find myself going on the offensive, acting like an asshole so he's mad at me instead of disappointed, so he thinks I'm crazy instead of just thinking I'm a loser. He's my little brother, and he doesn't deserve anything like the way I'm treating him, but I can't handle anything else. I just wish I could still see some of the admiration he used to have for me."

There was a sound from the kitchen, and Angus jerked his eyes up to see Toby standing in the doorway, pie in hand, looking at him.

Angus was about to automatically apologize when Toby said: "Chris isn't big into letters. He's more of a hands-on kind of guy. I don't know if I'll ever give that to him."

The meaning was clear to Angus, and he very much wanted to say something in return. That everyone made mistakes, maybe. That he would always admire Toby, that he didn't care what Toby had done or who he was, but that he couldn't stand to see his intelligent, competent brother making a fool of himself over someone so far beneath him. But then Angus remembered Lupe, and knew exactly what his reaction would have been if anyone had said that to him.

"Let's go." Angus stood, resting a hand, briefly, on his brother's shoulder.

Toby nodded and followed Angus downstairs, store-bought blueberry pie in hand.