Familiar

by J. Robert Lennon

  Indeed, that’s what it feels like to her most of the time. Their marriage is like sleepwalking: each afraid to rouse the other, for fear of what they’ll see when they come to. Elisa does know some things about herself, though. She has hardened, sharpened, intensified. But also calmed. She gained a new steadiness, she likes to think, a new strength. She is proud of what she has become.

  But now she seems to have become something else.

  8.

  As she exits the highway onto county route 31, she begins to think that perhaps all is, that all will be, well. That an explanation for what has happened is just ahead. Everything looks the same as when she left. The same dilapidated barns and rusted road signs and the abandoned farm fields overtaken by woody shrubs and goldenrod. Reevesport is a large town on the southern tip of Kineota Lake, home to the college and a hospital and a factory that makes chains. It’s unassuming, and it assumes nothing now, as Elisa crosses over the Reeve Avenue bridge and into the city limits.

  Here is the farm supply store, the burger joint, the Asian food market that is still open in spite of the always-empty parking lot and a nearly Asian-free local population. Here is the Walmart, the Hiway Motel, the Italian place the senator ate at once during the campaign. They live in a neighborhood overlooking the lake, but from a long way away; if you go out on the roof through the bedroom window and climb up to the top you can see it, hazy in the distance, green and rippling. She signals, turns, climbs the hill that leads her past the college, past the supermarket and horse pasture and onto their winding suburban street. It is all the same. She actually takes a quick look around the car, to make sure that it’s all really there, the binder, the blouse, the power windows, to make sure she wasn’t deceiving herself, back on the interstate.

  The mailbox is the same and the driveway she pulls into is the same. But the house is not.

  It is white, for one thing. It’s supposed to be a pale yellow-gray. It had been white when they bought it, but they changed it. The rhododendrons are gone, replaced by a row of sculpted yews. Or rather the yews they tore out a few years ago are still there. The grass, to which she had always been indifferent, is healthy and trim, and the pink dogwood, the one that had seemed certain to die but then rallied and came back to life, that dogwood is gone and in its place stands a Japanese maple.

  The house could be described as landscaped, well cared for. It is not an aesthetic that she particularly appreciates or feels capable of achieving through her own actions.

  Only when she begins to sweat again does she realize she has been sitting in the car, with the engine turned off, for several minutes. It would seem that she has entered into a minor state of shock. It is one thing to be driving an unfamiliar car, but her house? A motion catches her eye—it’s Derek, waving from the front window. She raises her hand to him. A moment later the front door opens and he stands in the frame, smiling at her, at the car.

  Derek in the doorway, smiling. Elisa closes her eyes, gropes for the calm, the steel. Her mind conjures a memory, not a specific one but a palimpsest of nearly identical experiences: hauling herself up out of the lake she and her parents used to go to in the summer, somewhere in Michigan: an aluminum ladder, bolted to the dock, the rank water sluicing off her body and out of her swimsuit, and Elisa at last standing steady on the bare wood in her bare feet—goggles on her head, the rubber strap tugging at her wet hair—gazing out over the choppy surface roiled by a coming storm. Up and out of the lake, under her own power, looking back at what she has emerged from: that’s the image that will give her strength. She draws, lets out, breath, takes up her purse and conference binder and holds them in her lap.

  Then, with deep reluctance, she gets out. She makes her way up the walk and Derek comes out to meet her. He’s wearing jeans, a clean white tee shirt, bare feet. He seems to be approaching too fast, and she flinches—but he only pauses to kiss her cheek, squeeze her elbow, and then he is past.

  She watches him pop open the trunk of the car and pull from it a small suitcase, hers apparently. Which he knew would be there. She turns, climbs the front step, enters the house.

  It’s tidy. There’s a new carpet. For years they talked about tearing up the old carpet, refinishing the pine floor, but here they have gone and gotten new carpet instead. A chair has been reupholstered. There are different things on the walls. She is startled by the sight of a studio portrait of the four of them, from when the boys were five and six, that she took down soon after Silas died. And here Derek has put it back.

  “The chicken’s almost done,” Derek says from the doorway. “You want a glass of wine?”

  “Please.” And he nods and disappears.

  She goes to the bedroom. It’s similar, aside from a new comforter and, again, the carpet. She slips her shoes off, then the stockings, then she sits on the bed for several minutes, taking deep breaths. She says “Okay” and goes down to the kitchen. A glass is waiting for her on the table. It’s the same table. But the cabinets are new, the linoleum is gone and replaced by synthetic hardwood, the refrigerator and stove are new. The glass is full of white wine. She doesn’t drink white wine, but she drinks it now. Derek is busying himself in front of the stove, sawing away at a roasted chicken in a pan. He turns, smiles again, comes to her and takes her face in his hands. They kiss.

  “I missed you,” says her husband.

  9.

  She is impressed with herself, at her ability to pretend. She lets him do the talking. He talks about a man in his department; she’s supposed to know who this is. He talks about world events. He looks good—if she has let herself go here, Derek has become more disciplined. He’s leaner, his skin has some color. She suspects that he has gotten a gym membership—it’s something he used to talk about doing but in the old life never did.

  “The old life.” It’s only been a few hours. Look how she’s adjusting! Derek is cheerful, cheerful, cheerful. The food is good, no wonder she’s overweight. The same magnets are on the refrigerator and she is wondering how to tell him what has happened to her.

  She gets up to load the dishwasher and he laughs at her. Come on, he says, and motions her into the living room, their wine glasses in his hand, bottle in the other. She expects a crisis—something—a confession—a discussion. Instead they sit down and he keeps talking, and she realizes that he wants to fuck her.

  So this is something they do, in this life. She remembers it now, this mood, the barely suppressed laughter, the ridiculousness of their desire. Here, in this life, it has returned. It isn’t that sex between them has ended in the other life, it’s just that it isn’t very funny, or very fun. It’s more like a reminder to them that they are married. It’s pleasurable and necessary and serious.

  They’re on the sofa and he’s flirting with her. He’s stroking her shoulder and her arms and she finds herself saying “Well!” She’s playing along, but of course it’s easy, this is her, this is Derek, even if it isn’t her, it isn’t Derek. This Derek is certainly attractive to her, she’ll give him that. She feels bad about the extra weight. But then doesn’t, not really, as he kisses her, unbuttons her blouse, takes her breasts into his hands. All of her feels a little more… luxurious. She thinks of Larry, her lover, the man from the frame shop, and she feels guilty—not as if she’s betrayed Derek, but as if she’s betraying Larry now. She doesn’t feel that way when she has sex with Derek in the other life. She wonders if this Elisa is sleeping with the Larry of this life. Everything is becoming confused in her mind, the Elisas and Dereks and Larrys, but this Elisa is turned on by this Derek. His hand is under her skirt. They’re undressing. They’re making little sounds.

  Suddenly Derek stands up, his shirt off, his pants unbuttoned, and holds out his hand. It’s time to go to the bedroom. She follows him, letting her skirt fall onto the carpeted floor. It’s quiet—the carpet makes everything quiet. Suddenly she likes the idea of carpet very much. She climbs the stairs, passing the photo of the boys as toddlers, then moves down the hallway, watching the
muscles in Derek’s back.

  Something catches her eye then, something she saw without seeing when she came up here to take off her shoes, and her mind tells her, Don’t look, just follow him down the hall. But she slows, looks, stops. There’s another photo of the boys here, with Derek this time, and something is the matter with it. The photo has been taken someplace she doesn’t immediately recognize, someplace outdoors. Hills and water in the background. They are all wearing windbreakers. Derek is the only one smiling, but you can tell it isn’t genuine, he is under strain, setting a good example. He is looking not at the camera but at the photographer, presumably Elisa but she doesn’t, still doesn’t, remember this. Sam is pale, drawn; he looks like this is his first time outdoors in a while. His face is riddled with acne and his hair arcs over his head in a cowlick. His most awkward time, when most boys had begun to look like men. Eighteen? He must be eighteen or nineteen. But that doesn’t seem right. Why not?

  It’s Silas, though, whom she is staring at now, Silas who is the problem. He’s looking at the camera, directly at the camera, as if he is thinking as he does it that it’s the future he’s looking at, future versions of his brother, his parents, himself, people he doesn’t know yet, people who might not even be born. In his eyes is the expression of calm calculation she remembers, of a sneakiness so subtle that he could not be accused of harboring it, not without the accuser looking like a paranoid, a fool. He’s smirking, that at least is how she reads this expression. She can’t remember where this was, she can’t remember, and it is suddenly very important to her that she remember, and she reaches out a hand to steady herself against the wall as she tells herself to remember, remember, you have to remember.

  “Lisa?”

  Derek, I want to come down the hall, I want to make love in this strange body, to your strange body, but I have to remember now, I have to remember this impossible thing or I am going to scream, because Silas didn’t live to seventeen, or even sixteen, he was dead two months after his fifteenth birthday, and this photograph cannot exist. And so I need to be wrong now, before we go to bed, I need to remember this moment.

  But it’s hopeless, because the moment never happened, not anywhere in her memory. And so she doesn’t go to Derek, doesn’t go to the bedroom, instead she stumbles into the bathroom, collapses onto the toilet seat, and bunches a bath towel into her hands and covers her face with it and screams and screams.

  10.

  When Derek knocks and enters she is still holding the towel in her hands. It’s unclear how long she’s been sitting here. She doesn’t look up because she doesn’t want to see him.

  “Lisa?”

  He’s kneeling in front of her now, inserting his head into her line of sight. He says, “Tell me what’s wrong.”

  “I’m confused,” she says.

  “Okay.”

  “I think I had a stroke.”

  His forehead creases and she can tell that he is more doubtful than concerned. She can’t blame him. He opens his mouth but most of a second passes before he says, “Do you want to go to the hospital?”

  The hospital, at this moment, sounds wonderful to her. Clean and sensible. She nods. He nods. He extracts the bunched-up towel, drops it on the floor, helps her to her feet. A few minutes later she has somehow gotten her clothes back on and so has Derek and they’re in his truck, on their way to the opposite side of town. It’s a long drive. This is the wrong side of town to have had a stroke on, she thinks. Downtown traffic is backed up because of a passing freight train. People are honking for no reason. Someone up ahead has a stereo cranked and the bass makes her feel nauseated. She shuts her eyes. The coins in the ashtray buzz: she thinks of Brownian motion, atoms vibrating too fast to see. Everything around her is vibrating. Her forehead is pressed against the passenger side window and Derek is holding her hand.

  “Is anything tingling? Is anything numb?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  There is irritation in his silence. Surely she should know if she is tingling or numb.

  She says, “I’m confused.”

  “About what?”

  “I don’t remember things.”

  “What don’t you remember?”

  She doesn’t answer. She wants to tell him everything. Traffic begins to move again.

  They wait in the emergency room while Derek fills out forms. It’s strangely silent, among the ferns and rows of airport chairs, though the room is filled with people. There’s no music, shouldn’t there be music? Elisa uses one hand to massage the other. Her breathing is shallow; her body feels insubstantial. Somehow the act of coming here—the act of agreeing to come here—has lightened her. She is no less terrified, but the terror is like the wings of some small bird, beating ineffectually against her. Where is her steely resolve? The image of the lake, of pulling herself up out of the lake, is of no use; she thinks of it and she can feel the dock swaying and lurching under her feet, and the boards are slimed with algae.

  They are called in to the examination area and led to one of a dozen rooms surrounding an open central zone of cubicles and workstations. It’s more like an office than it should be. She is given a thin gown and asked to undress and sit on a small bed. Then they wait again. Eventually a doctor introduces himself, Dr. Mayles. He’s bespectacled, nerdy, and friendly. The word socialized springs to mind. It’s the learned friendliness of a man who is not naturally friendly. He is around the same age as Elisa and Derek, and she suddenly imagines the three of them in a play group at the age of four—it’s as if they all grew up together, making their slow way toward this moment, this little tableau. She almost laughs.

  Dr. Mayles asks about her medical history, though Derek has already written it on the clipboard the doctor now holds. He shines a penlight in her eyes, holds her chin gently and studies her face. He takes her pulse and blood pressure, taps her knee with a tiny hammer, all the while talking slowly, quietly, asking her questions. What year is it? What’s five times seven? Who’s the president?

  2012. Thirty-five. Obama.

  She tenses. What if the president’s somebody else? But it seems to be the right answer.

  “You have two sons,” the doctor says, reading from the clipboard. “What are their names?”

  And as she says the names she realizes that she doesn’t want to be here, doesn’t want to have had a stroke, has made a terrible mistake. She says, “I’m sorry.”

  “Why are you sorry?” the doctor asks.

  “I’m fine. I think I’m fine actually.”

  Derek is standing beside the bed, both hands gripping the side rail. He is studying her. “You said you couldn’t remember things,” he says.

  “What can’t you remember, Elisa?” says the doctor.

  The fluttering wings again. She feels her heartbeat growing faster and weaker. “My… job. I was on a trip—I didn’t know what it was for. I don’t… I saw a photo in my house. Of our sons. And I couldn’t remember where it was taken. It was unfamiliar.”

  The doctor seems to have adopted Derek’s reckoning gaze. It’s contagious. He says, “When was the last time you had a CT scan?”

  “Never?” she says.

  “Okay. Let’s make sure everything looks normal up there.” Meaning, presumably, her head. “The nurse will take some blood. And then we’ll get you down to radiology.” He sounds disappointed. A look passes between him and Derek. But then Derek turns back to her and there’s nothing on his face but sympathy and worry. He takes her hand again.

  “Your job? What about it don’t you remember?”

  She squeezes her eyes shut.

  As promised, a nurse arrives and draws blood from her arm. She doesn’t look. Later she’s asked to sit in a wheelchair and is taken to the room where they keep the CT scanner. It looks like a giant toilet seat. Derek is asked to remain outside. She lies down on a table and a nurse, a different one, injects a dye into her arm, not far from where the blood was taken out. They are replacing my blood with dye, she thinks. A tech
nician instructs her to remain still, the room clears, and the machine knocks and hums as the table she lies on makes abrupt gradual movements.

  This is the most relaxing part of the entire experience. She is alone here with the machine. She isn’t thinking of anything at all. The machine is rocking her gently. She falls asleep.

  In the end, there’s nothing. Her brain looks normal. Her blood is normal—she’s maybe a little anemic. The doctor prescribes eating. “And B vitamins. You could maybe pick some of those up at the supermarket.” He tells Derek to keep an eye on her.

  “Are you beginning to remember?” he asks her, almost as an afterthought.

  She manages a smile. “It’s all coming back to me now.”

  11.

  It went this way:

  He wasn’t driving. The driver lived but ended up paralyzed and in a coma. The boy in the passenger seat was killed, as was Silas, who was in back with a fourth passenger.

  The fourth passenger was a boy named Kevin Framus. His injuries were not serious. He was the one who told the police what happened. There was an alley behind the brick factory, on the southern shore of Lake Monona, with a stone retaining wall that ran along one side and a chain-link fence along the other. The alley was long and lightless, and the driver, a twenty-seven-year-old man named Richard Samuelson, liked to drive down it at high speed with the headlights off.

  “Did he ever say why he liked this?” the prosecuting attorney asked Kevin Framus, many months later, during Samuelson’s manslaughter trial, which Elisa and Derek watched, over several days, from the hard wooden benches behind the attorney’s table, their backs sweating and aching, their minds exhausted, blank.

  “He liked getting rushed up.”

  “And this meant what?”