She goes out into the insane light and begins the trek back to the sanctum of her office.
36.
Next Friday morning. It’s August now. She rises early, showers, takes her already-packed bag out to the pickup. Derek would ordinarily be the first one in the driveway, standing next to the open driver’s side door, his arm on the roof, or leaning against the hood and scrolling through his phone. But today he’s trailing behind. There has been an air of desperation in the house, as though time is running out; his eyes have lingered on her too long, too many times. He’s been waiting for her to do something, say something. She knows what it is, and hasn’t. This is part of what makes him a good lawyer—his ability to draw out a rival with silence. But it isn’t working with her, because she doesn’t know what to say.
On the way to the airport, Derek says, “Look, Lisa…”
She waits. He waits.
He sighs and again falls silent.
For a moment, she considers telling him everything. What happened to her, what she remembers, Betsy, her session with Amos, even Hugo Bonaventure. Watching him drive, she remembers how much she used to enjoy being a passenger beside him. His calm at the wheel, his deliberateness. Economy of movement. Driving her places, he made her feel safe—or rather, made her feel comfortable indulging her desire to be protected.
But today these same qualities seem to her evidence of a deep conservatism, a fear of inadvertent revelation. She can imagine very clearly what his reaction would be if she tried to explain herself now—silence, a frown, careful consideration. I believe you, he would say. I believe that you think this happened. He would apply logic, lay out possible remedies, mostly involving the solicitation of outside professional help, the application of psychoactive drugs.
Elisa doesn’t want to have that conversation. She doesn’t want to embrace his frame of reference. Now, she just wants to live in this new world, delusional or not, and see it to its end.
They are almost there. His hands are wringing the wheel as he says, in a voice edged with desperation, “Will I ever know?”
She can’t remember when she’s heard him sound this way. Or known him to be in such a position. She is tempted to pity him. “Know what?” she says.
His eyes are filmed over, his voice strangled. He stares resolutely through the windshield, exits the highway. “What this is. Why you’re doing this.”
“I’m just going to see our sons. I have to see them.”
He sighs. “That’s not an answer,” he says, nearly in a whisper. They arrive at the airport. She expects him to park in short-term and wait with her. But he pulls up in the white zone. He doesn’t even put the car in park. He seems to have gathered himself; she can tell by the set of his face that he is shifting his anger and frustration away from her and onto himself. A dangerous state—it usually leads to a fight. Not now, though—she’s leaving. He says, harder now, “You are coming back, right?”
She levels a serious look at him. “Of course I’m coming back.” She kisses him. He accepts it with taut resignation. Then she gets out of the truck and he drives off without waving goodbye.
The flight is long. She hasn’t brought anything to read. She didn’t think she’d be able to concentrate. But she can’t sleep, either. Everyone around her seems to have some kind of digital device they’re using to entertain themselves. She wants one—it would be nice to watch television, something she hasn’t done in earnest in twenty years. Though in all likelihood you couldn’t get any stations on a plane. But then what are these people watching?
They land in Denver and she changes planes and then, hours later, they land again. The light in Los Angeles is very bright; the airport workers on the tarmac are orange blurs. It’s as if her pupils can’t contract enough. She’s near the back of the plane. The man beside her stands up as soon as it’s allowed, though it will be several minutes before he’ll be able to move. He stands awkwardly at his seat, sighing impatiently at regular intervals.
Elisa expects to see bustle when she emerges into the terminal. People in sunglasses, on phones, men in African robes, strung-out rockers on tour. Instead, the concourse is nearly empty. Sam is supposed to have met her, but there’s no sign of him. She stands in the middle of the broad worn carpet and squints in every direction. Then she sits down and rummages in her bag for her phone.
When he emerges from the men’s room twenty yards down the concourse, she doesn’t recognize him. Or rather she does—it must be him, she knows it as soon as she sees him—but tells herself she must be wrong. In truth, she has been preparing herself for this moment for weeks. She understood he would be different. She imagined him thinner than was healthy, unshaven, pale-skinned. Tired. This image frightened her at first, but she has gotten used to it. She is ready for it.
But Sam looks nothing like it. He’s clean-shaven, tan, and overweight. He’s wearing a pair of pleated khaki pants, running shoes, and a golf shirt. There’s a cell phone holster on his belt and he walks with effort, as though sedated.
She stands. He acknowledges her with a nod. When he is standing before her, she cannot help herself—she throws her arms around his neck and pulls him close. “Sam!” she cries, and he’s sweaty, he smells sour, she cannot believe this bloated creature is her son.
He stiffens and she feels his hands gingerly patting her back. His shoulders are big, they’re rounded, they feel like someone else’s. But no, this is Sam. He stumbles a bit, takes a step back; she releases him. His face is obscured by flesh, but the eyes are the same. They seem to search her face for some kind of purchase.
She stands very still and lets him look at her. He sounds tired as he says, “Hey, Mom.”
“Sam.”
“You seem different.”
Her laugh is almost a sob. “I feel different.”
Sam looks down at his feet. He says, “So… you know where you’re staying?”
“It’s a chain hotel. Near your house.”
She gives him the information and he nods. “Wanna go, then?” he says, and they walk together down the concourse. He keeps his hands shoved into his pockets, and his effortful walk now reveals itself as a slight limp. One of his feet isn’t quite straight, and he grunts, nearly inaudibly, with every step. She wants to ask him what happened, but is certain that she is either already supposed to know, or has deliberately been prevented from knowing. (She remembers his fake limps from adolescence, his indulgence in others’ pity.) A smell comes off him, like an office cubicle out of which the custodian has not yet carried the remains of lunch. She gasps a bit, holding back tears, but Sam doesn’t seem to notice.
They say nothing to each other as they leave the airport. He offers a questioning look at baggage claim, and when she shakes her head he nods and continues through the automatic doors. The air is brutally hot but dry, and she suddenly wishes she were in the sun. But in fact she’s in the parking garage, getting into Sam’s car. It’s quite new, an SUV, and very large. He gets behind the wheel and puts on a pair of aviator sunglasses that match, almost perfectly, the curve of his face. He looks like a giant insect.
Sam had a toy spaceman helmet, once, that Lorraine had given him. It was yellow, like a hard hat, and covered his head entirely; a large hinged visor of reflective translucent plastic obscured the face. For a time, he wore this helmet almost all day long: he would sit on the sofa reading picture books through it, he would sneak goldfish crackers or raisins up under the visor. He wore it to dinner, wore it riding his scooter, when they went to the store. He usually took it off to sleep, but occasionally she would find him in the morning still wearing it, the visor fogged, snores echoing out from under it.
He must have been five. He didn’t seem to have any kind of fantastic identity that he associated with the helmet, no invented narrative. He just wore it. The helmet was an accessory to his personality.
Its only apparent power, real or imagined, was that his brother ignored him when he was wearing it. Occasionally Elisa would catch Silas star
ing at Sam, gazing at the reflective surface of the visor, perhaps at his own reflection, or perhaps just lost in thought about the impression the helmet made. But he didn’t bother Sam in any way—didn’t push or hit, didn’t steal any toys or books or food. If anything, Silas redoubled his disruptive efforts elsewhere in the house, but it was a relief to Elisa not to have to pull them apart, to settle disputes.
The era was short-lived, of course. The helmet was always a little too small, and then Sam hit a growth spurt. Washing his hair one night, Elisa noticed twin wounds on either side of his scalp: scabbed and bloody tracks, as though he’d been scratched by some animal. She picked up the helmet, which lay on the floor behind her: its interior was filthy, greasy, crusted over with black deposits on two reinforcing ridges that matched Sam’s scrapes.
It had to hurt him even to put it on. The ridges worrying at the wounds all day long, the cuts struggling and failing to heal themselves. Sam winced as she applied disinfectant to the cuts, and then, later, silently watched her clean the inside of the helmet with rubbing alcohol, apply strips of felt to the ridges with double-stick tape. Elisa dreaded the day he had to give it up; she thought he would cry for weeks.
But it didn’t happen. For a little while Sam carried the thing under his arm, like an astronaut walking across the launchpad after a successful mission, and then at last he relegated it to his closet. Silas took up, once again, his efforts to torment his brother. Elisa tried to interest Sam in other helmets, none quite the same, but he shunned them.
On the one hand, it was as if he were determined to put it all behind him—not just the toy itself, but his need for its protection. He seemed, in this one small way, very adult.
On the other hand, there was something perverse about the totality of his resignation. Come on, she wanted to say—if a plastic helmet made Silas stop, then anything could make him stop. The helmet isn’t magical. This last, she did say to Sam, while she sat on his bed trying to talk him to sleep. It’s not the helmet, it’s you. But the boy shook his head—she could hear it in the dark, his hair scraping the pillow—and she thought, but didn’t say, Come on, Sam, fight back. Fight back.
Now they’re on the freeway and her son exudes that same grim acceptance of circumstance. She doesn’t even know what the circumstance is, but she can feel herself bristling in the presence of his capitulation to it. It’s midafternoon, not yet rush hour, and their progress is swift. Sam says, “I guess you’re not going to talk, then.”
It is the same conversation she had hours ago with his father.
“Fine then,” he says, without giving her a chance to reply. “So you’re here, and in a while you’ll go home, and I’ll never know what this was all about. And yet here I am driving you around.”
She says, “It isn’t anything in particular.”
He has no response to this. Minutes pass.
She says, “Things are changing at home.”
Nothing. She is fixated on his heavy thigh, sunk into the driver’s seat. Tears are pouring down her cheeks, though there is no tightness in her throat; she is able to keep her voice steady.
“Forgive me, Sam. I don’t really know why I’m here.”
Possibly he makes a small grunt of acknowledgment. His body shifts against the vinyl seat. She goes on: “There’s something… wrong with me. It might be best if you—if you pretend I’ve got amnesia. That I don’t remember anything about the past few years.” She turns to him. “I know that your father and I apparently decided to—to put you behind us. I don’t understand how we came to that decision. I accept that we did, but… do I owe you some kind of apology? I think I do. May I apologize to you?”
It takes him a few seconds to come out with, “What do you mean something’s wrong with you.”
She lets out a sigh. “I don’t know. I don’t even know. But I don’t remember anything that happened. Not for years now.”
There’s a minute during which his breathing seems to quicken and deepen. He is so strange to her, bovine and implausible.
“You can do whatever you want,” he says quietly.
“Do what?”
“You wanted to apologize, go ahead.”
“I’m sorry,” she says. It doesn’t sound like she means it, but she does, she does.
He nods. She takes a tissue out of her bag and wipes her face.
The car pulls up in front of a motel, and Sam parks. “I have to go back to work,” he says. “Silas is having you over for dinner. Some people are coming. You should be there at eight—it’s just a couple of blocks.” He pushes his sunglasses up the bridge of his nose; his entire face is slick and sweating. “I dunno. It’s fucked up. It’s fucked up that you’re here.”
She can’t speak.
“I don’t mean to be mean. You know. But I just… I really don’t get it.”
“I don’t either.”
“Okay, well…” He puts the car back in gear. “I really have to get back to work. Silas needs me to do some shit.”
She can’t stop herself—she says, “You still work with Silas.”
He lets out breath and tips his head back. “Jesus. Yes. I still work with Silas. I do the books at Infinite.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Me too,” he says, but she doesn’t know what he means by this and he doesn’t seem to either.
She gets out of the car, takes hold of her bags, and shuts the door. The tires bark on the pavement as Sam drives away.
37.
The neighborhood they live in is called Silverlake. She learns this from the motel clerk, who is a young black woman with pierced nose and tongue and an ostentatious straightened hairdo. When Elisa asks if there’s a place nearby to get coffee, the girl points and says, “Five blocks.”
But first she checks in. It’s four thirty in the afternoon. Her room is cold and dry. She takes a nap, then wakes up shivering half an hour later, her skin pulled tight, wondering where on earth she is.
The café is staffed by people who look like the girl at the motel. She sits at a wobbly table sipping her coffee and examines the maps she printed from the internet. The boys live on a narrow winding street several blocks from the main drag; she memorizes the route to their house, then tucks the papers into her bag and walks there.
A Spanish-style bungalow in apparent disrepair, the white stucco cracked and falling off, the shrubbery unwatered and half-dead. She stares at it from across the street for a while. No cars pass, though she can hear, faintly, the noise from the main street, blocks away. She contemplates returning to her motel but instead walks across the street and climbs the steps onto the wide shaded porch. A table and chairs are set up, and on the table lies a half-full ashtray and a bottle opener. A wind chime hanging in the archway is silent and still.
The driveway is empty of cars and the broad front window lacks any curtain or shade. She walks up to it and peers inside.
Elisa is surprised—the living room is quite tidy, perhaps to a fault. The Swedish-style furniture is new; the jute rug is clean and lies on even bleached floorboards. There’s a glass coffee table, an insectile aluminum floor lamp, and a sofa and two chairs draped in matching white slipcovers. Beyond this arrangement is an open door frame that leads to a bright kitchen, with black-and-white tile floor.
There appears at first to be a blanket wadded up on the sofa, partially covering a reddish-brown pillow. Elisa blinks, and the blanket and pillow rearrange themselves into the image of a naked red-haired girl.
The girl is asleep. She looks nineteen or twenty and is dangerously thin. Her flesh is pale and she has no breasts to speak of. One arm hangs down to the floor and the other is pinned under her body. Her legs are spread, her genitals in plain view. Elisa draws in breath and the girl opens her eyes.
At first, the girl appears not to have seen Elisa standing in the window. She makes no move to cover herself, and anyway there is nothing, no robe or towel nearby, for her to use. But the longer she lies there, eyes open, the clearer it becomes that sh
e has seen Elisa and is staring at her. The eyes are bleary and the face freckled; the girl’s lips are parted and between them lie small yellowish teeth. She is like a rare, damaged specimen of some endangered species, some strange rodent or bird.
Is the girl drugged? There is no expression on the face; the eyes blink with exaggerated slowness. Elisa doesn’t move—she wants to leave, but this would somehow be worse, a greater invasion of privacy than remaining still. Her ankle itches and her bladder feels heavy.
Finally the girl closes her eyes and rolls over and returns, evidently, to sleep. Her legs are sinewy, her feet large. Elisa watches her draw and exhale breath.
What precisely does she think she is doing here on this porch, in this city, interfering in lives she has evidently forsaken? Muscling this world onto some path where perhaps it doesn’t belong. She’s doesn’t have a plan, not really. She is still groping, still doesn’t belong.
But she felt this way, often, in her real life, too, didn’t she? It was the signature emotion of parenthood. There was no way to know what actions had which results, whether all of it was her fault, or none of it.
She has been assuming that her memories of life before the crash are valid here, but maybe they aren’t. Is any memory valid, really? Has she ever remembered anything the way it really happened? Has anyone, ever?
Maybe none of this world belongs to her. None of it.
She climbs down from the porch and wanders the streets, sweating. The light glinting off car windshields is again too bright. A greasy haze of unreality coats everything. She suddenly feels sick, as if the coffee she drank has just changed its mind, and she sits down on a curb over a street grate, expecting to vomit. But the feeling passes and is replaced by exhaustion. She finds her way back to the motel and asks the clerk to call and wake her at seven fifteen, but the clerk shakes her head and says it’s all computerized, just push the wake-up button on the phone.
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