Familiar

by J. Robert Lennon

  And then, a closing sequence. The camera, though of course there is no camera, lifts up as though on a crane, and a distant landscape is gradually revealed: not mountains, not the sea, but a trailer park, lavish in its dilapidation, pickup trucks and dirt bikes moving through its ragged streets; a commercial strip, populated by crumbling big-box retail spaces and empty cracked parking lots; a landfill, dump trucks and bulldozers swarming over it like ants, and tiny gulls swooping overhead; a cemetery, weedy and overgrown.

  That’s what lies ahead for the Man and Rose and her mother: suburban decay and ennui, pollution and filth, death and obscurity. Game over.

  Elisa wonders what sequence she would have been shown had she chosen to set fire to the family home.

  She turns off the television and the game console and lies on her back on the living room carpet. She ought to be tired, but she isn’t. Instead, her mind is clear. She closes her eyes and thinks. When she hears Derek enter the room, she says, “You’re right.”

  “About what?”

  “I’m going to go talk to Amos.”

  There’s no response. She opens her eyes, tips her head back. There he is, upside down. He’s staring at her.

  When she calls the therapist, he tells her to come right over.

  31.

  She gets lost. All she remembers is the name of the road—Orton Road—and that it’s on the west side of the lake. Eventually she finds it, goes the wrong way on it, drives for miles in confusion. Then she backtracks and everything begins to look familiar.

  Clouds have moved in and the temperature has dropped. There will be a thunderstorm. The meadow behind the therapist’s office is empty of deer and the grasses are bent by the wind. When she knocks on the office door, nobody answers. She hears her name being called: he’s behind her, on the back stoop of the main house. He turns and goes inside and she follows him.

  The house is low and close and smells like frying meat. It has the air of being lived in alone—somehow clean and squalid at once. Books are everywhere and the old windows distort the outdoors. He leads her into a living room, dark and comfortable, with a sofa and coffee table and desk and easy chair. This is where he spends all his time, clearly. He stands in the middle of the room and gestures at the sofa.

  Elisa sits down and waits for the therapist to do the same. Instead, he paces for a moment, as though measuring his thoughts. He seems smaller today, more intense and professorial. The kind of professor who doesn’t get tenure. His demeanor, his house suggest a man who has withdrawn from active life, declared himself an observer.

  At last he lowers himself into the easy chair. He knits his hands together. There is a wobble in his voice, the slightest sign of nervousness, as he says, “You were to have been open with me.”

  “I have been.”

  “Something is different.”

  She has dressed in business clothes, a skirt and blouse. She catches herself tugging the skirt down over her knees.

  He says, “Do you want to tell me what it is?”

  “I’m not sure I know.”

  He is agitated. His hands separate and rejoin. She is reminded of cell mitosis, the first time she saw it: a black-and-white film, in high school, that somehow seemed more real for its flickering jerkiness. The jittering little lives, straining to separate. The nucleus, exploding into two, pushing at the edges of its tiny world, stretching the cell walls until they broke. And then each half, identical now save for experience, drifting apart. As if they were never one.

  Amos Finley twitches. Flinches, maybe. “The way you are—it reminds me of the way you were when you and Derek first came to me. You’re being cagey—secretive. But nothing is supposed to be secret here. Didn’t you promise that?”

  “Did you make that promise, too?”

  He tries on an expression of hardness. But what she sees in his eyes, his slump, is a kind of panic.

  She says, “I can’t remember. The promise, I mean.”

  In response he closes his eyes for several seconds. Sits up. His back creaks, or maybe it’s the chair. When he opens his eyes again it occurs to her that he might be in love with her. The thought makes her sad, though not with pity. Rather with a sense of the impossibility of everything. The number of emotions in the world that can’t find purchase anywhere and are wasted. The therapist, she can see, is at a loss. There is some authority he had over her that is clearly no longer accessible to him.

  “Listen, Amos,” she says. In her tone she is aiming for tenderness. “I’m not trying to be difficult. I honestly don’t remember.”

  He is gripping his knees now, working at the fabric of his slacks. “What… precisely… have you forgotten?”

  “Everything,” she says. “Everything up until a few weeks ago.”

  He is gazing at her, frowning.

  She goes on: “I don’t remember coming to you, or any of the promises we made. When we were here a couple of weeks ago, it was like the first time I’d ever seen you. I don’t recognize my life. My job. Derek—he’s—he’s not the same. Do you understand?”

  He sits back, sighs. “You come back from a trip you took alone. To a business conference. And you begin to act nervous and confused, as though you’re trying to conceal something. Then you cease therapy entirely. And now you want to tell me you have… amnesia?”

  “It’s more complicated than that.”

  She sits back, stares up at a corner of the room. She has a sudden desire to clean this house—to haul these old chairs and lamps out to the curb, rip up the carpet, scrub every inch of the place. She would like to reform this man, reform his life. She says, “Amos, were you ever married? Do you have children?”

  The question seems to surprise him.

  “Humor me,” Elisa says. “Pretend I don’t know anything about you.”

  “Twice divorced,” he replies, quietly. “An adult daughter. From whom I am estranged.”

  “Have we slept together? You and me?”

  The question startles him. “No.”

  “Okay. Good.” There’s an energy in the room now that she likes—she feels as though progress could be made. She feels like the woman who just finished that video game—a person who can find a path and walk down it. “Good. Maybe you can help me.”

  “That’s what I am trying to do,” he says.

  “We need to make a new agreement. A new promise. Because the woman who promised things to you and Derek—that was somebody else. That wasn’t me. We’re going to make a new deal, just between us.”

  He shifts in his chair. It is clear that he doesn’t like it. But he’s curious enough to play along. He says, “Go on.”

  “When I’m here with Derek, I will try to be that woman, but you need to understand, I don’t remember. You need to help me out.”

  “I am here to help you.”

  “Here’s the thing, Amos. It’s not that I forgot. It’s like I never knew. I remember everything, but I have different memories. I remember my son, Silas, dying, nearly a decade ago. And Derek and me drifting apart. And I’m having an affair with a man named Larry who now, here, doesn’t seem to even know me. And I have a different job, and I wear different clothes, and my house is messier.”

  He is scowling, concentrating.

  She says, “A couple of weeks ago I was driving in my car, and it all changed, the car and everything, my clothes, my body, and I became this person. Who is in therapy with you. And is not having an affair, and has a marriage with these rules in it that I don’t know where they came from.

  “This is not my life,” she says to him, leaning forward. She is excited, astonished, that she is managing to say exactly what she means to say. “This belongs to somebody else. Some version of me that you know and I don’t. And I am pretending to be that woman.”

  She slumps back in her chair, lets out breath. “That’s why I’m different,” she says. “Because I’m somebody else.”

  There.

  For a while, Amos Finley simply stares at her, and Elisa
stares back. He closes his eyes, rubs his beard. He drums his fingers on the armrest of his chair, opens his eyes again, gives her a long appraising look. Then he gets up and leaves the room.

  She hears him in the kitchen. Bottles rattle as the refrigerator door is opened. She hears ice cracking and clinking. A few minutes later he comes back into the room holding two ice waters in pint glasses and hands one to Elisa. She thanks him. He sits down.

  He says, “You need to tell me what you want.”

  The question takes her by surprise. “I came here because you told me to.”

  But he dismisses this with a shake of his head. “You came so that you could say this to me.” He is back in charge now. His voice is clear and directed. He says, “Do you want to be cured of this apparent delusion, this dream of a previous, or alternate, life? That is, do you want to live fully in the life you are now occupying? And that I have helped you create? Or do you want to hold on to what you believe is real, and alter this life to suit?”

  Until now, this question might have been easy to answer, had anyone asked. She wanted to hold on to what she believed was real. But now she isn’t sure. She admits this to him—she says, “I don’t know.”

  “All right,” he says, “then that’s something we’ll have to figure out. I want to make sure I understand: you believe that Silas is dead, and has been for some time.”

  “In the world I know, he is dead.”

  “In the world you know, yes. In your memory, you haven’t seen him for years. You know nothing of him, this young man who is now an adult.”

  She says, “I’ve been following him online. I know what his job is. I know Derek and I rarely speak to him.”

  “Do you want to see him?”

  “I’m going to,” she says. “I’ve been in touch with Sam. I bought a plane ticket.”

  He appears surprised. He says, “You understand, much of the work I have done with you and your husband has involved helping you to detach yourselves from your children. Silas in particular. You have chosen your marriage over your children.”

  “No” is all she can say.

  He nods. “That’s what you’ve done. That’s what this reality is all about. From my perspective—and I am just telling you what I believe based upon what I’m seeing—from my perspective, you are having a psychotic break. Some part of you is rebelling against the choices you’ve made. Your guilt has gotten the better of you and you are denying the reality of your children’s estrangement from you.”

  She is beginning to feel uneasy now. “I did not choose my marriage over my children.”

  He is nodding, nodding, nodding. “The woman I know did exactly that. Sam allied himself with his brother, moved away with him. You tried to separate them, to persuade Sam to come home. You became depressed. You were hospitalized, more than once. This is not your first break. Your marriage nearly fell apart. Finally you gave up on your sons.”

  “I love my sons. I love Sam.”

  “That is not in question, Lisa, but you and Derek put them behind you.”

  It is like the moment on the road just after it happened, the semi blowing past, her head on the wheel, the undented soda can crushing itself in her mind. Panic is blooming in her. She opens her mouth to deny for the third time that she chose her marriage over her sons.

  But the truth is that she believes it. That it is possible. The psychosis, the hospitalization. Making the choice. She is, was, capable of this. More so, certainly, than the universe is, of moving her from one reality to another?

  This is not your first break.

  She has rarely bothered to remember—allowed herself to remember—the year leading up to Silas’s death. The van crash was like an exclamation point at the end of a cruel running joke—when they buried him, she took that whole year, rolled it up, and dumped it into the grave with him. They were of a piece.

  But in truth, the crash was a fluke—an interruption of that time, not a completion of it. And she can remember feeling close to giving up. Lying in bed awake, making deals with herself. What would she sacrifice for it all to go away? To return to what she used to have with Derek, the kind of love that once defined her life, that was the point of her life, that moved her to give up the life she thought she wanted?

  Elisa supposes that, in her world, in the world she knows, she suffered a first break after all. The year of blankness, of losing weight and embroidering until her fingers bled. But what was her first break here? What pushed her to it? What did it take her away from?

  She looks up so suddenly from her thoughts that Amos gives a start. She says, “What was it? What broke me the first time?”

  The question makes him uncomfortable. He fidgets. “You were addicted to the internet. Groups, forums. Many of them about children with mental illness. And politics, you became obsessed with politics, and you were angry all the time. You stayed up all night on your computer, posting on various forums under various names, and, according to Derek, you would only talk about those things, your children and politics. Sarah Palin, you became obsessed with Sarah Palin. You lost interest in sex. Derek nearly moved in with another woman.”

  Elisa says, “Sarah Palin? Seriously?” She barks out a little laugh.

  Amos doesn’t, or won’t, smile. His hands are folded in his lap and he is watching her intently. “You became dangerously thin, and chain-smoked.”

  “I hate politics! I don’t smoke.”

  “You chain-smoked. Your sons moved out west, and you engaged in loud and sometimes inebriated conversations with them on the phone, at strange hours. And you ended up in the hospital, after Derek found you knocked out cold on the kitchen floor. You hit your head on the corner of the counter and the coffee urn was shattered on the floor and you had been burned by hot coffee. You were treated for malnutrition as well as for your injuries, and when you got out and stabilized, that’s when Derek threatened to leave. Instead, the two of you agreed to come see me. And we worked out the terms. That you would leave the boys alone, and quit the internet and smoking, and eat regular meals with him. And he would give up contact with the woman.”

  “Debra.”

  “Debra.” He untangled his hands, wiped them on his knees. “Who, in any event, now lives elsewhere and is married, if I remember correctly.”

  “Forever?” she says.

  “Sorry?”

  “The boys, forever? We are never to have contact with them again?”

  He groans, and his tone, when he speaks, is exasperated. “You were not to have contact with them. Derek could, if he liked, though he has not seemed inclined to do so. I don’t know. You were to cut off contact, and it could be restored only through mutual agreement. Between you and Derek.”

  “I’ve broken the agreement.”

  He nods. “Yes, you have. Derek is afraid for you, Lisa. He isn’t angry. Or rather, he has managed to control his anger. He’s worried. He is afraid you’re breaking down again.”

  There is a long pause as she tries to get it all straight in her mind. It makes a horrible kind of sense. All those aspects of her personality that she fears, over which she feels she has only the most tenuous control, those are the ones Amos has informed her led to her breakdown. It is how things might have gone.

  “Lisa?” Amos says, sounding somewhat alarmed, and she is surprised to find herself standing up. “Where are you going?”

  “I’m going home,” she tells him over her shoulder, and then she’s out the door and heading for the car. She expects him to be right behind her when she turns, but he’s not: he’s standing behind the screen door, looking out at her with his hands at his sides. She waves at him through the windshield, to reassure him, and he raises a hand.

  He looks sad, as though he’s failed.

  32.

  Instead of going home she drives up the lake to the state park. There is almost nobody there, because of the impending rain. A pickup truck is parked in the lot and a man is asleep on the rocky beach. A fat woman is listlessly fishing off the en
d of the jetty.

  Elisa stands on the shore beside the stone benches and gazes at the power plant on the other side of the water. This is where the photo would have been taken. She tries to imagine what circumstances would have brought them here together—her and Derek and both boys. In her memory, it was hard getting the boys to do anything, let alone with the two of them together, by the time they were thirteen and fourteen.

  Until now, Elisa used to think of those years, when she thought of them at all, as a time when Silas had to be endured. And indeed, he was unpleasant to be around—imperious, disdainful, he rarely opened his mouth except to mock or criticize.

  But his mind was elsewhere—he was thinking about his life outside the house. By this time he had friends, sycophants, female followers; he had come into his bad-boy good looks, the James Dean cheekbones Lorraine was pleased to note had come from her; the thick black hair the wind always seemed to blow into an arrangement of perfect, studied nonchalance. He used the phone a lot, went out on his bike without asking, following just enough of the house rules to avoid open conflict. He showed every sign of not caring what they thought.

  But Sam simply grew sullen, wouldn’t come out of his room. Moved slowly. The collars of his shirts were always frayed and wet from nervous chewing. He licked his lips incessantly, leaving the skin around his mouth livid and peeling. There were bags under his eyes. The older of the boys, he nevertheless seemed like the baby of the family, fleshy and uncertain. Silas, of course, was uncommunicative: he was rarely there, or distant if he was; he answered their questions with the bare minimum of effort before ducking away, back into his private world. But Sam’s unresponsiveness was more vexing. He didn’t try to escape. He just sat there in the kitchen, or lay on the bed, eyes open and blinking, thin hair stuck to his moist forehead.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I guess.”

  “It’s late, you should go to sleep.”

  A shrug.

  “Do you want to talk?”

  “No.”

  “Did you get enough to eat tonight?”