Familiar

by J. Robert Lennon

  The time his older brother Nate, drunk, groped her. She did not take it personally—it was something between Derek and him, a rivalry with deep and mysterious roots. Maybe it was about Lorraine, or about their dead father. At any rate Derek simply grabbed his brother by the back of the shirt, dragged him to the door, pushed him outside, and locked it behind him. He left Elisa to drop Nate’s duffel bag and car keys out a second-story window. She had known of many such rivalries in her life—there was a time, in college, when she thrived on other people’s stories of familial disharmony—but she had never heard of one that ended so suddenly or endured so completely. She has never seen Nate again, rarely even heard his name uttered—even now, retelling the story, Derek refers only to “my brother.” You’re dead to me. Derek would never say anything so dramatic, but he could mean it, live by it. He is a man of regulations, absolutes.

  He is telling her, now, about the time he broke up a fight on the street and ended up in the hospital. (She remembers she was angry at him, and proud; frustrated that he should insert himself into someone else’s life in this typically masculine fashion. But why is he reminiscing about this, of all things? Why is it important to him, to their life story?) And now he begins to tell her about the boys. (His gaze leaves her face and body and drifts to the window; his voice quiets. He does not want to discuss this. But he will do as she has asked, what he has agreed to.) Sam: the pregnancy test in the convenience store bathroom. Her craving for peanut butter cups. Lorraine’s absurd objection to certain baby names: “If you call it that, I will never speak to you again.” Elisa waking in the night, eight months pregnant, telling him the baby didn’t feel right. The drive to the hospital, the midwife’s vexation; Sam had shifted; he wasn’t where he belonged. The doctor’s efforts to shove him into place, the sudden gush of fluid onto the table, the emergency cesarean. And Silas, eleven months and three weeks later: unexpected, uncanny. Her obstetrician had retired in the interim and the new one, a young, nervous man, advised against a natural birth. She insisted. She knew it would be easy. It was easy, waking to labor, arriving at the hospital just after eight, birth by noon.

  It is all the same so far, the story is as she remembers. But his voice is growing increasingly strained, as if he has been forced into a lie. Then he stops, and says, as if exasperated, “Does this have something to do with them? With the boys?”

  She doesn’t respond.

  “Is something going on that you haven’t told me?”

  “No, no. They’re—when was the last time you talked to them? The last time we talked to them. Remind me.”

  His eyes widen, then narrow into a scowl.

  “I don’t remember,” he says. “Why are you asking me this?”

  She doesn’t know what to say. She folds her legs up under her nightshirt.

  “Is it Sam?” he asks. “Have you heard something from Sam?” As if this is a plausible circumstance, as if he’s been waiting for it to happen.

  “No. I don’t know. I don’t know, that’s why I’m asking.”

  He stares at her a long time. She says, “Please, just go on with the story.”

  He closes his eyes, slowly, draws breath. There is a very fine sheen on his forehead. He tells her about their place on Gorham, Elisa’s abandonment of her studies. He says this carefully, as though it might hurt her to hear it. The boys’ early childhood. The Montessori preschool where they ate brown rice and seaweed for snack and made toys out of sticks and leaves and feathers. Or was it Waldorf? And shouldn’t she have cared enough to remember? She hated the place at first, until she met the aide, a kindly old German woman who told the children violent folktales in a barely penetrable accent while waving her fat arms over her head. Sam’s fall from his high chair, his stitches, the scar he still has (why does so much of this narrative consist of injuries, accidents, fights?). The time Silas went missing: they spent an hour and a half stalking through the neighborhood, calling his name, searching the park, knocking on doors. Panic, terror.

  She remembers a thought that came to her then that she has repeated to herself many times over the years and that she still doesn’t fully understand: I have finally gotten what I deserve. (In the end Silas had crawled under their bed and fallen asleep.)

  And now the stories focus on Silas. He begins to change. His unwillingness to take naps. His boredom. At four, he is no longer content to hear a story or to play with the toys he has. He doesn’t listen to what they tell him, or rather he seems not to hear. He is impassive in the face of punishment: where his brother wails with frustration and regret, Silas tends to endure, quietly, with evident puzzlement. If Sam is absorbed in something, Silas will disrupt it. It isn’t the behavior that disturbs them, but the evident lack of malice. He isn’t being mean. It’s as if he is conducting a social experiment. He will tear a magazine out of Elisa’s hands and throw it across the room. Or he will spill his dinner on the floor, then quickly turn to Derek to see his reaction.

  They learn not to react emotionally. Or to react at all. They leave the spilled dinners where they lie. They finish their own meals deliberately, silently, while Silas pounds the table in a monotonous rhythm and Sam cries and cries.

  Derek hesitates now, in the telling. He says, “And of course the time…” He pauses, his expression sour, and glares at her.

  “Derek, don’t, you don’t have to,” she says, because she knows where this has been going. It all leads to this, for him. She feels, suddenly, as though she has made a major tactical error—that this, on the heels of the fake stroke, the hospital visit, has led her into a cul-de-sac she can’t get out of. Surely she seems completely insane to him.

  “There’s the time I hit him,” Derek says.

  “Derek, stop, it’s okay, I didn’t mean—”

  She squeezes his hand but he pulls it away. He says, “That night at dinner. He threw the sippy cups on the floor. And then while we were trying to clean them up he grabbed your glass and then mine—”

  “Stop, stop. I know this, you don’t need to do this.”

  “—and he smashed them on the table until one broke. And he cut himself, cut his hand,” Derek says, gazing levelly at her, “and I hit him, didn’t I. Open-handed across the cheek. I knocked him over.”

  “It’s all right,” she says, “stop.”

  “And raised bruises on his face.”

  “Derek,” she says. “Stop, please.” He is staring at her, slack-jawed. Elisa feels a deep sympathy for him: he had been looking forward to this day, the dinner, the wine, going to bed. She has fucked everything up for no clear reason. Now he shrugs. He’s finished with the story.

  Of course she remembers it, too. When Silas smashed the glasses, he flinched—Derek flinched, but he didn’t cry out, and he didn’t shout. Instead he stood up, leaned over Silas, drew his arm back. Elisa thought, Do it. And he did. A moment later Silas lay on the floor, broken glass around and beneath him, the first expression of genuine surprise they had seen on his face in months. Silas cried this time, for sure. Then Sam, then Elisa. Then Derek.

  He says, “Why are you doing this.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “There had better be a goddamn good reason.” He leans back, covers his face with his hands. “A stroke, Lisa? You didn’t have a stroke.”

  “I thought…”

  “Something happened. You met somebody.”

  “No, no.”

  “Then what.” His voice muffled by his fingers.

  She says, “I can’t explain, not yet. There’s no one else.” Though there is, there’s Larry.

  He’s waiting.

  “Just tell me about one more thing. One more. From later.”

  It takes a moment for him to react. To understand, evidently, that she needs him to agree to hear her question. His hands slide off his face and lie limp at his sides. “All right,” he says.

  She has grown cold now, even in the flannel nightshirt, and she bunches her hands into fists and shoves them together into her lap. �
�When the boys were fifteen and sixteen,” she says.

  “Okay.”

  She hesitates a moment before saying, quietly, “Was there a crash? In a van?”

  She expects him to gape, shake his head in disappointment, walk out of the room. Or, Of course there was, he nearly died, why are you doing this? But instead he only blinks. He is bewildered.

  “A crash?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t… no. No? I don’t remember a crash.”

  “Silas was in a band, a rock band with a guy named Ricky. He was older, he was in his twenties. And that boy Kevin.”

  “Uh huh,” he says, but he doesn’t remember. And then he does. “Oh,” he says. “They were in a crash. They were playing chicken or something?”

  “Yes!”

  “And they died, some people died.”

  “Yes, yes. And Silas?”

  “Silas? There was a funeral, we tried to get him to go. He wouldn’t go.”

  She says, “He had nothing to do with the crash? He wasn’t in the van?”

  He coughs out a little laugh. “No!”

  “Nothing happened then. To Silas. Around that time.”

  “Well,” Derek says after a moment, “there was his lost weekend. Was that before or after the van thing?”

  She wants to say “Lost weekend?” but bites it back. Derek goes on.

  “I barely remember the van thing, I can’t tell you when that was.”

  She says, “Tell me about the lost weekend. I want to know how you remember it.”

  The eyes again narrow. When he speaks, she can tell that he’s had nearly enough of this game: he’s going to quit soon. He says, “All right, well, he left school that Thursday afternoon and didn’t come back. Somebody saw him out in the parking lot, smoking, as though he was waiting for somebody—I remember the school secretary told you that, on the phone. And then we didn’t see him again until Monday night.” He is staring at her. “Monday night? Is that right?”

  “I think so,” she says, quietly.

  “The police were looking for him, we took turns driving all over town—I think we were out all night two nights running, then we just couldn’t stay awake anymore. I canceled my appointments Monday, and we just sat at home, waiting. You said, ‘He’s never coming back.’”

  “I did?”

  There is a tightness to his voice when he says, “Yes, you did.” He pauses. “I thought so too. As you well know. As we have discussed many times, alone and with Amos.”

  She does not ask who Amos is, though she wants to. Then she wonders if this is a test, if there is no Amos, and she is supposed to ask who he is. But no, why would he do that? In any event, Derek has moved on.

  “He never said where he’d been. But he’d lost weight—he looked terrible and reeked of cigarettes and body odor. He appeared, in every respect, homeless. His school attendance was poor after that. He rarely spoke. Then I got my job offer and we moved here, and entered into the next phase of our strange life together, Lisa.”

  He’s angry. She turns away from him, looks out the window, into the darkness; superimposed over the glass, her face looks heavy and old.

  Derek gets up, delivers his empty beer bottle into the kitchen. When he returns he passes by the sofa and climbs the stairs to bed. Halfway up, he turns. “I still think there’s somebody else,” he says. “I think this was all about the third rule.”

  She doesn’t know what this means.

  He waits.

  “I’m sorry. The third… I’m forgetting…”

  His mouth turns down in a way that she recognizes from the real Derek, the one she knows. Polite displeasure. He thinks he is being mocked.

  “Refusing. You refused.”

  She says, “Refused…”

  Angry now: “Intimacy.”

  “I don’t—” But now she is just making it worse. His shoulders and jaw are tensed.

  “You fell in love with somebody, and you thought you could come home and pretend it never happened, but you couldn’t. You panicked.” He shakes his head. “A stroke.”

  “It’s not like that. That’s not what’s happening.”

  “So what’s happening?”

  Elisa’s throat is half-closed, and her voice is strangled when she says, “I don’t know!”

  He twitches, as if he’s about to reply. And then she watches him master himself—the eyes close, the muscles relax. He lets out breath. “I love you,” he says, quietly and with resignation, then turns and continues on his way. A few moments later she hears the mattress groan underneath him.

  It’s an hour before she is able to join him, and another before she sleeps. The first day is over.

  14.

  She’s awake at four thirty. She is lying in the bed beside Derek, not touching him; his chest rises and falls in the gloom but he makes no sound. She permits herself a moment of hoping that yesterday never happened, or was a dream, but this is folly, even lying still she can feel herself occupying the wrong body.

  Out of bed, down the stairs. The carpet bothers her now, it’s like she’s still in bed. The place smells different here—synthetic, unlived-in.

  In this life, there’s a laptop computer sitting on the kitchen island. Maybe it’s just where Derek does his work. But she doesn’t think so—he has his study. The computer must be hers. Beside it lies the binder she brought back from the conference that she has no memory of. As the computer boots she opens the binder, stares at the pages, at the printed-out e-mails. Her palms are sweating, her feet are cold, her behind hurts where it meets the hard wooden kitchen stool. She feels hung over.

  She has to make a decision.

  When the computer is ready, she brings up the SUNY Reevesport website, finds the biology department, reads about it. (They have wireless internet in this life, like a normal professional family.) It’s fairly well regarded, particularly for plant biology. She recognizes some of the names of faculty members—people whom she has encountered through her lab in the old life. There’s a guy who did some important work on fungi, another who is an expert on fatty acids in seeds, and won an award for it.

  There’s a list of support staff. And there she is. Graduate studies coordinator. No picture, no job description.

  She could call in sick. It would be easy—she’s been out of town, she could have picked up a virus. Nobody would find this unusual—it would buy her some time.

  But then what? She will have to go to work eventually. She will have to do something.

  The way she sees it, there are two choices. Fake it, or not. If she chooses not to fake it, to quit her job, she’ll be starting over. She’d have to depend upon Derek’s love and patience, which, however devoted (resigned might be the better word) he might seem in his present incarnation, she knows have their limits. In this life, she will be the woman who suddenly dropped out, who had a nervous breakdown—though she is not dropping out, is not having a breakdown. Or, at least, she doesn’t feel as though she’s having one. Is a breakdown a thing you feel, or a thing that changes your relationship to other people? In any event, friendships will end—though what does she care? She didn’t have many in her real life, and she is not invested in this one.

  It occurs to her to wonder what this means. She thinks, I expect that this is temporary, and that I will soon return to my real life. But, if this is my real life, then I am a woman whose only emotional investment is in an imaginary life. Thus, I am insane. And so I’d better hedge my bets—I’d better be invested in this life. Just in case.

  She realizes now that she will never be able to explain to anyone what has happened. No one she knows now, at least not in her real life, would understand. Elisa doesn’t understand, for that matter. How could she explain?

  No—she will have to fake it. How hard, really, could this job be? It’s summer—there are no graduate classes in the summer, right? It isn’t academic application season, she doesn’t think. From Derek, she knows that summer is the time for overhauls, for long-term pro
jects. There will be time and space to figure it out. And once she has done so, she can figure out the rest. Whatever it is that has happened to her.

  It’s decided, then. She’s going to give it a try. She’s going to go to work. Of course the implications of that decision won’t begin to reveal themselves for several hours, but there’s nothing she can do about it now.

  There is something she can do, however, and with Derek still asleep and the house quiet, this seems the time to do it. She moves the cursor to the search bar and types Silas’s name into it. She reaches for the ENTER key, lets her finger hover over it a moment. Pulls it away.

  It isn’t clear when this happened to her; perhaps it happened to everybody at once. But at some point the internet became more real than the physical world. There was a time when it seemed like a dream—an impossible thing with uncertain implications. And then suddenly it was everything. There are people, she knows, who don’t use it, who have no presence on it, who can’t be searched for, who can only be accessed by going to their house and knocking on their door. But those people are the dream now. They’re like ghosts.

  There was a time, she thinks, as her hand moves back toward the keyboard, when a physical artifact—a letter, a piece of clothing, a room full of still-unopened boxes in another world—was the conduit to what could be known about a person. Touch that thing, hold it, smell it. Inhabit it. Close your eyes and remember.

  Now, you search first, remember later. We don’t need memory anymore—the internet has replaced it. And it’s a good thing for Elisa, because it is all she has. She lets her hand fall. She hits ENTER.

  There are, it turns out, many Silas Browns. A blind computer scientist, an audio recording engineer. But it doesn’t take long to find her Silas, her living son. He is a programmer for a video game company. There he is, photographed in a parking lot in front of a low buff-colored cinder-block building, standing unsmiling in a small crowd of other unsmiling young men. She leans close to the screen. Her throat catches: he’s an adult, he’s really there. He’s wearing sunglasses.