Familiar

by J. Robert Lennon

  Elisa’s hand is trembling as she does this, sitting on the edge of the bed, on the slick synthetic-fiber comforter that will not allow her body to find any purchase. When the operation is finished, she throws back the bedclothes and climbs in, shivering and fully dressed. Falling asleep makes a sound in her mind like a steel marble circling the drain.

  38.

  Two hours later she stands on the sidewalk again looking up at the bungalow. The driveway is full now; Sam’s SUV is here, a small sports car, an old Volvo, and a motorcycle. Long shadows of palm trees and phone poles rake the street. Her breathing is quick and shallow and she wants to run away. But she climbs the steps for the second time that day and knocks on the door.

  Sam answers. His body fills the doorway. There’s a large glass of something in his hand, whiskey she supposes, with a couple of half-melted ice cubes floating in it. He manages a small smile that quickly fades. “You don’t have to do this,” he says, and she can detect in him, for the first time, some small reservoir of compassion. She thinks, This is really happening. This is how things are.

  She says, “I came all this way.”

  After a moment, he steps aside and lets her in.

  People, young people, fill the living room. Each holds a drink in one hand—straight-sided glass tumblers of something—and a cigarette in the other. They embrace no recognizable style. One boy looks like the counterpart of the girl at the motel—black jeans and tee shirt, piercings and wild hair. Another wears suit pants and an untucked oxford shirt and tiny round glasses with lenses not much larger than his eyes. There are a couple of guys who look like members of a biker gang—she recognizes one of them from photos of the Infinite Games staff. A fat girl with big breasts stands alone by the wall. And the girl from earlier is here, wearing a simple, baggy linen dress that is too big for her. Its hem drags on the floor.

  It isn’t that any of them is particularly unusual, set against the strangeness of humanity; taken alone, any one would qualify, at first blush, as mildly eccentric. But there is something abstracted about them as a group; the party seems conceptual, like a movie set. It is as if none of them knows any of the others, as if they have all just met.

  Sam comes up behind her and says, loudly, “Everyone, this is Lisa.”

  A few people turn and say hello. The fat girl actually appears frightened.

  She is trying to decide, in the half-quiet that follows Sam’s introduction, whether or not to reply when a figure appears in the kitchen doorway, holding its own drink and cigarette. It is unmistakably Silas. His eyes travel first to the red-haired girl, and then follow her gaze to Elisa.

  In spite of everything, she wants to cross the room and embrace him. Oh, Silas—I know you so well. Every year, in that motel room in Wisconsin, she has lain on the bed, eyes closed, and imagined what he would look like if he were alive. She has invented a hundred scenarios for him—lives he could lead, experiences that might transform him. He has been rich, he has been imprisoned. He has been married, itinerant, famous, missing.

  She never imagined this one, of course.

  Silas is advancing toward her across the room. The party has lost interest in her, conversation has resumed, but she can’t shake the feeling that everyone is watching, that they all know what she has done, what has happened to her, what is going through her head. That they are witnesses to an experiment of which she is the subject.

  He is standing before her now. It’s him. “Lisa,” he says.

  His body is strong—that’s what strikes her. Always, as a child, he was smaller than his brother, slighter. He is wiry now, muscled. He looks like he could climb up a wall, jump from rooftop to rooftop.

  And his face, it is so familiar: the expression of impassivity, the features flattened by indifference, as though pressed against bulletproof glass. His eyes are half-lidded, his small mouth opened slightly, the skin tanned and lightly coated with sweat. He is twenty-four years old. She flinches when he takes one of her hands in both of his, lifts it to his thin lips, touches it to them. They are warm and dry.

  “Silas…”

  His eyes open wider and meet hers. They seem to know that she isn’t his real mother. He releases her hand and it falls to her side. “Would you like anything to drink?” he asks. She can’t read his tone.

  “All right,” she says.

  His eyes bore into her, then blink. He doesn’t ask her what drink she wants. He just turns and walks back toward the kitchen, with a spring in his step. She remembers him as a toddler, the sight of his small hard back retreating through a doorway or around the corner of a room, the feeling that something just out of sight was about to happen, something would be… disrupted.

  There is a presence beside her and she remembers that Sam is here. That Sam exists. He’s breathing loudly again, loudly enough to hear against the background noise of the party. She turns to him and he is gazing at her with mild curiosity and apparent exhaustion. His glass is empty except for the ice cubes, which are little more than slivers now. His face is red and puffy and she realizes that he is an alcoholic. Silas is doing this to you. I did this to you.

  Sam turns away and follows his brother, heaving himself across the room. Elisa is left alone at the door. She can see the boys moving in the kitchen. She doesn’t want to be standing here when they come out.

  Everyone in the room is half her age, but they seem older somehow. She stumbled into parties like this in college—disdainful or insecure people, trying to act cool. She liked the law students for their politeness, their confidence. They were invested in the system, they felt comfortable there. Elisa never thought of herself as a misfit—she didn’t like misfits.

  Having children changed that. The pitying way other parents looked at her when Silas pushed their kids or stole their toys. She understood the outsider mentality. It came in handy in her old life, her real life, where she painted paintings and had extramarital affairs. She feels compelled to let these people know—I’ve been loathed and pitied, too. I paint paintings.

  Instead, she goes over to the red-haired girl in the long dress and says, “I owe you an apology.”

  The girl blinks.

  “I came to the house today and looked in the window. I’m afraid I may have embarrassed you.”

  The girl looks frankly at her, taking in her clothes and shoes and face. She says, “You’re their mother.” Her voice is surprisingly low.

  “Yes.”

  The girl shifts her insignificant weight from one foot to the other and her dress moves against her body. It’s obvious that the dress is all she’s wearing. It’s so large and hangs down so far that the upper edge of an aureole is visible at the neckline. Her nipples show through the thin fabric and Elisa feels cold looking at her, though the room is warm.

  Elisa hears more people entering behind her—a small crowd in fact. She smells cigarette smoke and hears bottles clanking together inside a paper bag. And then she realizes that she has seen this girl before. The perfect round arcs of the eyebrows are the same, and the oval chin. The oversized, not big, nose.

  “You’re the girl from the game,” she says.

  “What?”

  “From Mindcrime. Silas’s game. You’re the waitress at the diner.”

  The girl appears confused for a moment; her eyes film over. Then she seems to remember, and just as suddenly to lose the thread again. Elisa feels bad for bringing it up. The waitress in the game was voluptuous, full-hipped and large-breasted, radiant with health. Whereas this girl is sick. Did she ever look like the waitress? She blinks, again meets Elisa’s gaze.

  “What do you do?” the girl asks.

  “I work at a lab,” she replies, then corrects: “A college, I mean.” But the girl isn’t listening.

  “No. What do you do?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  The girl licks her chapped lips. The lip-licking continues. She’s smiling, a strange distracted smile that could be left over from some other conversation. The teeth are small
and sharp with tiny spaces in between them, and a hard look has come over her face, a desire to inflict hurt.

  “When you’re not at your lab. At a college.”

  After a moment Elisa says what she fantasized saying moments before, she says, “I paint.”

  The girl says, “Waterfalls? Horses?”

  “Abstracts.” But she doesn’t, of course. This Elisa doesn’t. Her studio is an office now—Derek’s office.

  “Abstracts,” the girl says.

  “That’s right.”

  “Do they match your shoes?”

  There’s a tug on her arm. It’s Sam, rescuing her from the conversation. The girl looks at the floor and Elisa mutters goodbye. She is introduced to some new people, none of whom she notices. Suddenly she wants that drink. She detaches herself from her son and goes to the kitchen. Silas isn’t there. It’s small and dirtier than it appeared through the window, the stove burners lined with aluminum foil in which grease is pooling around bits of burned food. At least they’re cooking, she thinks, that’s a good sign. A bottle of bourbon is standing on the counter, and she helps herself to some, using a cracked tumbler from the drying rack. There’s a jar beside it, a mason jar filled with some brown liquid that seems to be slowly swirling and glittering, and she stands there a moment, sipping the bourbon, trying to figure out what the jar contains.

  Silas walks in from another room, running his hand through his hair. “Oh,” he says, “that’s right. Your drink.” He brushes his hands together, as though he’s just finished sawing some boards, and leans against the stove, arms crossed.

  Elisa’s heart is galloping. She takes a deep draught from her glass and says, “Silas, what is wrong with that girl?”

  “What girl.”

  “The red-haired girl. The waitress from the game.”

  His eyebrows rise infinitesimally, but his expression remains otherwise unchanged. “Rachel? She has problems.”

  “She needs help.”

  “Going to unleash those crack mothering skills?” he says. “Worm your way into her heart? With all of your kindness and charm? All your experience helping people?”

  She can’t speak. He goes on.

  “What with your life devoted to thinking about things besides yourself and your petty desires.”

  “You should talk,” she says.

  “I don’t pretend it’s any of my business. That girl is fucked up and she is dealing with it. It isn’t my fault. Not everything is my fault. This will come as a surprise to you, Lisa. I’m not to blame for everything. Some stuff is even your fault.”

  39.

  She feels it, the old helplessness. The feeling that she has run, suddenly, unexpectedly, out of options. This was the signature emotion of her years as a parent of small children, the feeling that at any moment the mother in her might simply expire, leaving her alone, in some private world of failure, with the parts of herself she had abandoned. There must have been some signal she gave off, some stale odor or subtle corporeal slump, that telegraphed this emotion, because Silas always seemed poised to exploit it, to see what he could accomplish inside the space it created: the time he learned the word bitch, and all day he said bitch, because he had heard her refer to another woman this way, and knew she disliked this woman, and knew the word would do something to her, would make her react. And so she didn’t react, not at first. She turned the other cheek, like the pediatrician told them, like the child psychologist told them, like the piles of parenting and self-help books told them, she turned and walked out of the room.

  But walking away was a reaction, ignoring was a reaction. It meant a real reaction was forthcoming. He followed her around all day, saying the word, until finally, the day nearly endured, her head aching and throat tight, she went into Sam’s room to say goodnight, and Sam looked at her, his face quivering with uncertainty, and said, “…bitch?”

  She slapped him, hard, across the cheek. And before he could react went into Silas’s room where Silas lay on his bed beneath a galaxy of glow-in-the-dark stars laughing, and she slapped him too, harder, twice.

  Silas screamed—not cried—as though she were sawing off his leg. She could feel through her feet the boy’s body writhing in the bed as in an epileptic fit, and his head thumping against the wall beside it, something he had begun to do to drive them madder still (but there she goes, ascribing motivation to this strange act, when who could know, really, why Silas, or anyone for that matter, did anything?)—there were marks there, visible in the daytime, stains and depressions left by his sweaty head. And by now Sam was crying too, and Derek’s feet thundered on the stairs and she felt herself being pulled out of the dark August-hot bedroom, away from the stink of boyhood and the wailing and the thumping of Silas’s head against the wall.

  Derek led her down the stairs. He laid her on the sofa, pushed her down, held her arms down at her sides. “Stop it, stop it,” she was telling him but he wouldn’t let go, and soon she was struggling, like Silas, thrashing her own head, trying to knee him in the back.

  Eventually she gave in. He wasn’t going to let go unless she gave in. So she lay still listening to the children cry and she said, “I need to apologize to Sam.”

  “What happened?” Derek said, and she could not stand the fucking sound of his fucking patronizing holier-than-thou voice, as though she was the only irrational person in the house. Fuck you, Derek, she thought, fuck you for eternity.

  “Sam called me a bitch and I slapped him.” Not true, a voice told her, he had said the word, he hadn’t called her anything. He had said the word and she had assigned the intent. But she did not correct her story.

  “Sam did?”

  “Let go of me, Derek.”

  “And that’s what he wanted,” Derek said, almost to himself. “To make you slap Sam.”

  “Let go of my arms.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Die, you fucking fuck. “I have to apologize to Sam.”

  “You won’t go into Silas’s room.”

  “Derek,” she said between clenched teeth. “Let fucking go of me.”

  He did as she asked, slowly, as if she might spring up and attack him, and she climbed the stairs and apologized to her son. This would be the first time they almost decided to separate, she and Derek, the first of three. The second was right before Silas calmed down, right before he started doing well in school; and then there was the one right before his death.

  They should have broken up sooner. Their love for each other was not important, but this wasn’t clear to them at the time. They just wanted to be with the only other person who understood, whatever the consequences.

  “He made me,” Sam whispered to her that night, tears on his cheeks. “I know,” she whispered back, “I’m sorry,” and rocked him to sleep.

  Two weeks later he turned seven.

  40.

  She tries to keep a steady voice, though her throat is tight and the words come out strained. “I see what you do, Silas. Online.”

  “Online?” She has caught him off guard. His face is long, bony, a man’s face, not a boy’s, and the word massive occurs to her, though he is not large. He is simply her son, a man.

  “The forums you’re on. You treat people badly. You invent new versions of yourself just so you can treat people badly.”

  Silas’s eyes widen and he barks out a laugh. “You’re webstalking me?”

  She hears a noise behind her and in a moment feels a hand on her arm. It’s Sam. “Mom.”

  “That is really something,” Silas is saying. “I’m not nice enough to people. On the internet! Did you catch that? I’m a dick on the internet, and Lisa has flown out to LA to let me know.”

  “We ought to go,” Sam is whispering.

  “Listen to your good son, Lisa, he’s right. You ought to go.”

  But I don’t want to go, she’s thinking. This is what I came for. Although it occurs to her that, ultimately, she doesn’t really know what she came for. Except to see. Her eyes fall from her
son’s face to the counter, where the liquid in the jar is still swirling, though no one has touched it. The liquid is pearlescent. It appears to be illuminated from within. And she wonders, ludicrously, and for no clear reason at all, is this part of an experiment Silas is doing, part of his effort to create other universes? Perhaps it is in this kitchen’s twin, in another universe, that he created this one. And now, from inside this universe, he is trying to create another. That’s it, in the jar, that’s the matter that will expand into it. Ten pounds of matter, Betsy told her, packed into a really tiny space. She wants to reach over and pick up the jar, see how heavy it is. She looks down at her glass and sees that it is nearly empty.

  Silas is staring at her. If he has noticed her noticing the jar, he gives no sign. She allows Sam to lead her out of the room, through the crowd of people, out of the house. She’ll come back. She needs to pick that thing up, to heft it and peer into its depths. The red-haired girl is nowhere to be seen. Elisa leaves her glass on the table on the porch, beside the ashtray and lighter.

  Down the front steps and onto the sidewalk. Sam is marching her along the street, his fingers tight around her arm. She says, “Sam. Let go.”

  He releases her, tosses the arm back to her. It flops against her side. “I told you not to come.” They’re walking fast, toward her motel.

  “That girl,” Elisa says. “What’s wrong with her?”

  “She’s Silas’s.” Dismissively, as though this makes speculation pointless.

  When they reach the motel he follows her into her room. The curtains are open and the evening sun is blazing through the window, but the room still seems dark, and the air is clammy. Sam turns the air conditioner down. He has brought something with him, in his pocket, a bottle of whiskey the size of a beer. Elisa sits down on the bed and watches him unwrap the two tumblers from the tray on the nightstand and pour a few fingers of liquor into each. He still has great facility with his body, when he isn’t around his brother. She remembers the towers of blocks he liked to make, such irresistible invitations to Silas. Even long after it became clear these projects would not survive his brother’s attention, he continued to build and defend them. He would spend hours beside a tower of blocks, his body taut with attention as Silas walked by.