Stay Awake

by Dan Chaon

  Maybe at one point in his life, Rob Higgins might have been one of those types, with their boisterous, unimaginative confidence, but he wasn’t that way any longer. Even then, I could see that something about him had been subdued and broken down, and I relaxed a little.

  Rob Higgins was having a hard time, Mrs. Dowty told me later. A tough life, she said, some of it his own making, some of it just bad luck. Whatever cockiness had been a natural part of him had withdrawn and would probably never really return to him.

  He was Mrs. Dowty’s nephew, her sister’s son, and he and Mrs. Dowty had grown close since the death of Rob’s mother and Mrs. Dowty’s son in the same year. They had bonded, Mrs. Dowty said, and Rob had started to spend a lot of time at Mrs. Dowty’s house, though this didn’t turn out to be a cure for anything, necessarily. He continued to have problems—issues with drugs and depression, I gathered. Trouble getting along with his teachers. An intense and destructive relationship with a girlfriend.

  He was sitting there eating cereal and he looked up and regarded me when I came in. It was the kind of look that you would give if a small animal—a squirrel or a stray cat—walked brazenly into your house and stood in the doorway of your kitchen while you were bringing a spoonful of Corn Pops to your mouth.

  “Well! If it isn’t young Robert Potter!” Mr. Dowty said. He was at the stove making some scrambled eggs in a skillet and he was the first one to speak. “I was just about to come and wake you up!” he said.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Are you hungry, sweetheart?” Mrs. Dowty said.

  Rob Higgins said nothing—but he kept his eyes on me steadily, a kind of mild hostility emanating from him. A drop of milk fell from his spoon and he blinked.

  I was telling this to Cassie one night when we were first getting into our mode of marathon telephone conversations.

  “Wow,” she said. “That’s a great story, Robbie!” She had been making appreciative sounds the whole time—“yes,” “mm-hmm,” “right,” “oh—I get it …”

  And of course when you are in the presence of a good listener you can start to feel as if you actually have something interesting to say.

  “I don’t know why you say that you can’t remember anything,” she said. “That all seems pretty detailed to me!”

  “I guess so,” I said. “My memory has actually been pretty good since I came to Cleveland. Or at least it seems like it is.” I considered for a moment. “I guess the big problem is that I’m not always sure about whether anything is accurate.”

  “Hmm,” she said. “That’s a problem for everyone, sweetie.”

  Sometimes I thought about asking Mrs. Dowty.

  She came up to my room above the garage, looking for unwashed glasses and dirty dishes, and I sat there in bed, in my underwear, embarrassed. It was two o’clock on a Saturday afternoon.

  “Hey,” I said. But she was in a mood. She picked up one of my socks from the middle of the floor and looked at it gloomily.

  “You don’t have to do that,” I said. “I’m going to do it.”

  “Then you should have done it already,” she said. “What were you doing up at all hours last night? I saw that light of yours was still burning at four in the morning!”

  “Nothing,” I said, though for a moment I wondered if she had been able to see me through the window as I talked with Cassie on the phone. I should just tell her, I shouldn’t lie, I thought. “I was just … thinking about stuff, I guess,” I said, and she gave me The Eye.

  “If you’re having problems with the insomnia, you should go talk to Dr. Bloom,” Mrs. Dowty said. “She could probably give you some medication for it.”

  “Mom, I’m fine,” I said. “Geez. I haven’t seen Dr. Bloom since I was fourteen.”

  “She did you a lot of good,” Mrs. Dowty said. “You were in pretty rough shape when you came to us. You know that, Robert. And Dr. Bloom got you calmed down, didn’t she?”

  “I guess so,” I said, though the truth was I hadn’t thought of Dr. Bloom in years. I didn’t recall that she’d done me that much good. Mostly, it seemed to me, the two of us just sat around and played cards for an hour every week, and then she would write me a prescription for something.

  Well,” Mrs. Dowty said, “you’re a grown-up now—you have to make your own decisions, don’t you? I can’t force you to do anything.”

  “I just like to stay up late,” I said. “That’s all.”

  Mrs. Dowty sighed and nodded a little. She held three drinking glasses in her right hand, clustered between her fingers like bells, and for a second it seemed as if she were offering them to me. I held my hand out awkwardly. The pads of her fingertips inside the rims of the glasses, the formation of

  flesh pressed and wet against a

  “You can’t go on like this forever,” she said.

  She peered out the window, down at the driveway and the basketball hoop that she and Mr. Dowty had set up for me when I first came to live with them. For a moment, maybe we both thought about the kind of kid I’d been back then, picturing me down there dribbling and shooting, twelve years old, small for my age, dribbling and shooting, smaller than anyone else in my class, seventy pounds, maybe, circling in the driveway and dribbling and shooting, and I could remember that so much more vividly than anything in my life up to that point that it seemed as if I must have spent seven years in that driveway and only a few long summer afternoons in various foster homes, instead of vice versa. What was the name of that family I lived with before I was sent to the Dowtys?

  Lamb? Lambert? Something like that. I sat there, sending out feelers into my memory, tracing it back past the Lamb/Lamberts and it was like trying to place stepping-stones down from one bank of a creek to the other side

  The group home in St. Louis and

  The Lamberts

  And the Holroyd sisters

  And that lady Darlene, who was my mother’s cousin

  And those ones who were religious.

  Morrison?

  I had never been a very good rememberer. That was one of the downsides of being in contact with Cassie. It reminded me of the things I didn’t like about my own mind, the problems with the ways in which it worked and didn’t work.

  I knew the basics of my own life story, of course. I was five when LaChandra and Nicholas were murdered, and then there were several foster families, one after another, each one farther away from my old home. I came at last to rest in the home of Mr. and Mrs. Dowty when I was twelve, and that was where I went to school from seventh grade on to graduation. I began to work for my cousin Rob’s house-painting business during my freshman year at the community college, the year that Mr. Dowty died, and I continued to work for him after I stopped attending classes. I lost the ring finger of my left hand during a fall from a ladder.

  Mostly, I thought, I was an average, normal person. I paid my bills. I went out to the bar on a Friday night with my buddies and had a decent time. I liked to laugh at funny shows on TV and I did my work and I tried not to take stuff too seriously.

  Still, sometimes I felt worried. On Friday nights, sitting in Parnell’s, I’d listen to the other guys talk about themselves, retelling a memory of something that happened to them when they were kids, and I realized that my own brain worked differently from the way theirs did. Their minds were built up of stories—Tony, with his sagas of girlfriends and breakups, or Tino, with his rambling supply of misadventures in which he was always the prankster or the victim, or even Rob Higgins, who had his life sorted and categorized into a catalog of best and worst moments.

  I loved the way that they could maneuver through their pasts so easily. I loved the way the events in their lives had beginnings and middles and ends, the way their stories had points to them—morals, or punch lines, or twists.

  But when my turn would come around, I never knew what to say. I can’t really think of anything, I’d tell them. I don’t really recall, I’d say, because I didn’t know how to describe the place I went when I s
at home at night, when I sank down in the old claw-footed bathtub with my eyes closed, when I stared at the mirror, watching my reflection run its fingers across its face. I’d ask my mind to remember simple things: the house where I lived with my first foster family, for example; or the Christmas of my eleventh year; or my oldest sister’s face.

  But what I got was another thing entirely. Even though I’d concentrate, the pictures my brain would send me often didn’t make much sense. I’d conjure up a vivid image of a row of brownstone apartments and a cobblestone street; I’d imagine that I recalled an organ grinder and his monkey on the corner, and people passing by in clothes from a hundred years ago. I’d call forth a farmhouse in the middle of cornfields, and I’d see myself walking on a winding dirt road, looking up as a pterodactyl slowly flapped its wings, passing across the moon. I’d picture a crumpled potato-chip bag, or a snowy tundra, where a woman was pinning white sheets to a clothesline in the wind, or the sound of something scratching on the door in the night. Maybe, I thought, the memory-recording apparatus in my head had been damaged in some way.

  But when I mentioned all this to Cassie, she seemed unimpressed. “That’s all very poetic,” she said. “But that’s just whimsy, Robbie. It’s not memory. I mean, you do know the difference between fantasy and reality, don’t you?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “You’re not a schizophrenic, are you? I mean, you don’t really believe you once saw a pterodactyl, do you?”

  “No,” I said. I hesitated for a moment. “No, of course not.”

  “Well, then,” she said. I was sitting there on my narrow bed, picking at my bare feet. It was about one-thirty in the morning. We had been talking nearly every night for months, and this wasn’t the first time that I didn’t know what to say.

  “You don’t have to make up stuff to impress me, Robbie,” she said. “I love you just the way you are.”

  “Thank you,” I said, and she laughed lightly in that way that usually made me feel a kind of glow but this time did not. I wished I could see the expression on her face.

  But I couldn’t picture it. Actually, I still didn’t know what Cassie looked like, and that, in fact, was another small point of contention that had developed between us. She had promised on several occasions to send me a photo, but it never arrived.

  “What!” she had said, the first time I brought it up. “You mean you haven’t got those photos yet? I sent them two weeks ago!”

  “Well,” I said. “They never came.”

  “That’s crazy!” she said, after another week had passed. “I can’t believe your cruddy mail service! They must have gotten lost again!”

  “They must have.”

  “Well, I’ll send some new ones. I’ll send them certified this time.”

  “Okay,” I said, and waited as June turned into July. But when I asked her again, her voice got a little chilly.

  “I really don’t like to have my picture taken,” she said. It was one of the times when there were weird noises in the background again, as if she were just outside the door of some busy, unhappy place, like a police station or a hospital waiting room.

  “Actually,” she said, “those photos I sent you were basically the only ones I had. Now I’ll have to get some new ones taken.”

  “Well,” I said, “I’d really like to have a picture of you.”

  “Ha!” she said. “It’s probably better if you remember me like I was! I’m basically the same as I was twenty years ago—just older and fatter!”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. And she didn’t seem to understand that when I talked about my memory, I was partially trying to explain to her that I didn’t remember anything at all about her, not even her face. I wanted to ask if she still had curly red hair, but maybe she never had curly red hair. After all those years of searching for me, she would doubtless be offended, I thought. It would hurt her feelings to know how little of her had held fast in my mind.

  Walking home from Parnell’s on a Friday night, I’d sometimes think of talking about it with Rob Higgins. Sometimes the nights were beautiful—a little fog, or the moon—and we’d be side by side, two old friends with a lot of beer between us, and it seemed like it should be easy to talk. People called us “the two Robs,” and said that we were “inseparable.”

  But it was difficult. The stuff about Cassie was hard and complicated to explain, for one thing. For another, I had the feeling that Rob Higgins would be upset. He had been slow to accept me, and when he finally did, it was as if he had decided to invent me out of something else—out of Douglas, out of a person he’d imagined.

  He was big on the idea of family, and was always telling me how great my foster parents were, and how he’d wished, growing up, that they could be his parents. “Yer mom makes the best pickled cucumbers I’ve ever tasted,” he’d say. Or: “I miss yer dad so much,” he’d say. “He had the greatest sense of humor—how did he come up with all those jokes?” Or: “Yer parents had the nicest taste in furniture. I used to love going over to your house just to sit in that one recliner.”

  Every time I would think about telling Rob Higgins about Cassie, comments like these would arise in my mind. He would be stumbling along down the sidewalk, grinning affectionately at me, and I couldn’t help but feel that if I told him about all the time I spent talking to Cassie, I would seem like kind of a traitor. He had always just assumed that I had melded completely into my adoptive role, as if I didn’t even realize that I wasn’t a blood relative. He would joke that we probably seemed kind of trailer-park-esque to people, two cousins with the same first name—as if he’d forgotten that I had already had the name of Rob before I became part of his family. He even told me how much I looked like my foster father.

  “I see him in your face,” Rob Higgins would say, after Mr. Dowty had died. It was a compliment, but it was also a little weird and uncomfortable. Despite our years of friendship, there was always a certain level of pretending going on between us.

  I couldn’t help but consider it when I got home that night from Parnell’s. A certain level of pretending, I thought, as Mrs. Dowty’s face appeared in the little window above the kitchen sink. She was waiting up for me, and I waved to her and smiled to show that I was on my way to bed. It was touching that she worried about me, I thought, but I also felt aware that it was complicated for her. Even though I’d called her “Mom” for over ten years now, there was also a part of me that still felt like a stranger, a certain part that she didn’t know.

  “Of course she’d be a little nervous,” Cassie said. “I know I would be. You’re the son of a killer! And let’s face it, Rob: You’re not the average twenty-five-year-old guy. You’re a little weird, you know? I can imagine her sitting there in the morning with the newspaper: “Oh, look. Here’s an unsolved murder. Here’s a rape over at the community college. I sure hope Robbie isn’t involved …”

  “Thanks a lot,” I said.

  “You know what I mean,” she said. “Partially I’m joking.”

  But partially, I guess, she wasn’t. We had talked for a while about the idea of meeting, maybe Cassie coming to Cleveland for a visit. But Cassie never felt like it was a good idea.

  “I don’t think any of us are ready for that kind of thing yet,” she said.

  From the beginning, she had been very firmly opposed to me telling Mrs. Dowty about our conversations. “It’s better,” Cassie repeatedly said. “It’s better if you don’t bring it up,” and as I struggled to get my key into the door, I knew that Cassie was probably right. There were times during the week when I’d feel so natural with Mrs. Dowty that it seemed like she had been my mom for my whole life. I’d eat oatmeal at her table in the morning and she’d gently, affectionately put her palm on the back of my neck. We’d watch television in the evening, gossiping about the characters on our favorite programs; we’d shop for groceries together on Sunday afternoon, and I’d fix the things around the house that needed fixing.

  Sometimes I’d try to imagine how
it might be. “Hey, Mom,” I could say, one afternoon while we were playing chess in the kitchen, and Mrs. Dowty would lift her round, thoughtful head. “Do you remember those other kids … the brothers and sisters I had? The biological ones?”

  And she would say: “Oh, honey, that’s in the past. You don’t want to think about that anymore.”

  And I would say: “Well—actually, there is this woman who called me. Named Cassie. And she says she’s my older sister. I’ve talked to her. A couple times now.”

  And I thought that we could have really had a conversation about it—she would have been interested in it, I thought, and she’d have been happy when I expressed a few concerns about Cassie’s honesty. She would have some solid advice.

  But then I’d come home from the bar and I’d know that Cassie was right. I could feel the moonlight of Mrs. Dowty’s gaze on me as I fumbled with the key and the jagged mouth of the keyhole. Remembering what Cassie had said—the son of a killer, she said—I could now imagine the lapping of Mrs. Dowty’s worries and doubts passing over me.

  Robbie is a good boy, I imagined Mrs. Dowty thinking. He’s like my very own son, she was thinking. Just like my own flesh and blood! He’s a good boy, a good boy.

  I don’t know. Maybe I was only projecting such thoughts onto her. Projecting: That’s the term that Cassie used.

  “It’s natural for you to be concerned about these things,” Cassie said. “We’ve all of us got to come to terms with it. Whatever is in our genes. You’d be foolish not to be a little scared.”

  “What do you mean?” I said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Cassie,” I said. I was sitting at the little table near the window that looked out onto the driveway, cleaning paint off my skin with a rag and a little bowl of turpentine. I didn’t like the direction our conversations had been taking lately.

  “You know,” she said. “You remember how Karen used to get. All those lies and her little fake hallucinations and trances and stuff. Before the little ones—”