"No," Don explained awkwardly, "I mean, when you're doing math. Are there, uhm, math voices, you know, telling you things?"
As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Don wanted to bite his tongue. It was too dark to see Charlie clearly, but he could practically feel his brother tense up.
When they were younger, he used to think that Charlie was incapable of taking offense, of being angry with anyone. There was a three-year stretch when he'd refused to take Charlie to movies because the kid just didn't seem to understand even PG jealousies and aggravations. "Why is he yelling?" he'd ask, tugging on Don's sleeve, looking up with big, dark eyes that reflected the light from the screen. "Why is she so upset? Doesn't she know it will turn out OK?" Don would explain that it was just pretend, but that confused Charlie even more: "Why would they pretend not to like each other?" As though the characters were real people, as though Don had all the answers in the world.
In fact, when the presenter today had explained how psychopaths were often unable to understand other people's motivations or to comprehend that others saw the world differently, Don had immediately thought of Charlie. And then he'd felt guilty, because he knew now that Charlie did get angry, furious sometimes—he just usually took it out on himself. With other people, he became frustrated. Like now.
Charlie leaned back in his chair, resting his head on the back, setting his lemonade glass down on the floor. Being deliberately calm. Don couldn't make out his expression in the evening light, and he suddenly remembered the little boy in the dark movie theater.
"I'm a mathematician, Don" Charlie said quietly, "not a magician, not a medium. I find numbers to suit patterns that really do exist; I don't make up any of it. You—and David, and Terry and even Dad—like to joke about my crazy equations. They're not crazy, and neither am I. The equations are fact, they're science, they're a lot more accurate than FBI profiling. Maybe how I work seems strange to you, but I don't go into trances and just come up with answers from thin air. I look at the data and work it out. And I do mean work. No voices, Don; not about math or Communist spies or whatever it is you're really asking about."
Charlie catapulted himself out of his chair and towards the door, not looking at Don, but talking louder and faster now. "You still don't think it's possible that I know things, understand things, that you don't. There has to be another reason, right? Something other than my just being better than you are at something. But how you can sit there, in this room, and act like these numbers aren't real—aren't everywhere—that's just beyond me, Don. Are you as good at reading evidence as people say you are?" He tapped notebooks and textbooks and chalkboards as he walked across the garage and right out the door.
Don thought about going after his brother, but somehow all his nervous energy had evaporated. God, he was tired all of a sudden. With Charlie, even simple things were exhausting; Don felt like they spoke different languages and missed a lot in translation. They'd been getting along, solving that ice cream thing together—ok, so Don had needed help and Charlie had already known the answer, but still…and then Don had to open his big mouth.
What was wrong with him? With them? Other people got along perfectly well with their adult siblings. Terry, for instance, had shuttled between divorced parents as a kid and then been posted all over the country as an agent, but you'd never know it. When she and her sister got together it was like the Favorite College Roommate All-Girl Reunion Tour: girly and grown-up at the same time. She and Caroline went shopping and ate out every night; they went dancing and drinking and took day-trips to the beach where they gossiped about work and men. (And probably, Don thought, men at work: he'd only met Caroline Lake once, but she'd seemed to know an awful lot about him). David not only ate dinner with his sister and her children at least once a week, he actually turned off his cellphone while he was there. "Uncle Dave is in great demand as a babysitter. He tells kickass bedtime stories," David had said, proudly. "Uhm, not that he uses words like that; Linda would wash my mouth out with soap!"
"Wait, is this the sister whose husband you don't like?" Don had asked, surprised.
David shrugged. "Yeah, Jim and I, we don't always see eye to eye. Lynn says the word, I'll knock him into next week," he said simply, "but she's a big girl, I trust her to take care of herself."
That's what they needed: a little more trust. And a little less of the competitive hothouse atmosphere they'd grown up with, where Charlie wanted to prove he could keep up with Don, and Don wanted to make the point that he was too cool to even be in the same league. He should have gotten over that "who wants to be a math genius, anyway?" stage by now. Instead he was still saying thoughtless things, not taking Charlie seriously. No. No, Don reigned himself in: he was not taking all the blame for this one. If Charlie couldn't understand concern, even when it was badly phrased, well, whose fault was that?
It wasn't anyone's fault, really, and it wasn't intentional. They just misunderstood each other, constantly, at a fundamental level. Charlie had been joking about the stock market and not joking about Larry and the cookies; Don hadn't gotten that. What else had he read wrong? Don had offended Charlie and wasn't quite sure if he deserved the reaction he'd gotten. It was like he'd said something horribly rude in Japanese when he'd only meant to ask for directions. Maybe it had nothing to do with him: perhaps Charlie was jealous of Anthony Padgett, maybe was more upset than he'd seemed about that stunt in the kitchen. It didn't matter what the real reason was, because like that stupid theorem, Don would never figure it out on his own.
Don collected the glasses and what was left of the cookies and walked back into the house. Terry had told him once—a long time ago now, back when they were in school—that love had no biological basis. You don't love your siblings because of some genetic compatibility, you love them because you knew each other so well and shared so much. In other words, for the same reason that you liked your friends, only more so, Terry had explained, because family has a home-court advantage: they know you better and share more. Don didn't know how well he and Charlie knew each other, but he was pretty sure that they two of them were the only people left in the world who drank lemonade full of limes and cherries. At the time, Don had listened to Terry because she was a pretty girl talking about love; she was still pretty, but now he listened because she didn't need to use a federal crime as an excuse to call her sister.
Don stood for a while at the front door, tugging at the cockeyed deadbolt, trying to decide whether he should go talk to Charlie, or wait until his brother cooled off, or just stop trying so hard. He was thinking so intently about what Terry had said that he was startled when the bolt and its screw came loose in his hands. He'd pulled it loose from the molding without even realizing it. Damn, could he touch anything tonight without ruining it! Stupidly, he held the hardware up against the wall, as though it might somehow mend itself. It didn't, of course, so he put it in his pocket. He'd just come back tomorrow, he figured, to fix what he'd broken. And maybe talk to his brother.