Sam takes the only chair in the room, facing her, and hands her one of the glasses. He says, “You have to tell me what you want.”
She drinks. “I just wanted to see you.”
“What did he think?”
His enunciation of the word he—an emphasis half mockery and half vestigial respect—tells her that he is referring to Derek. “I don’t know.”
“And the therapist guy. Who you hired to do all this to you.”
“You know about all that?”
Sam doesn’t respond.
“I didn’t tell him I was coming, Sam. The therapist, I mean. I just came.” Though she remembers, moments later, that she is lying. When he doesn’t respond, she says, “I needed to see you.”
“Is this amnesia thing a real thing, or is it just bullshit?”
She leans over to place the glass on the nightstand. She doesn’t want it. She says, “It’s real.”
“You honestly have no memory of, what exactly?”
“I told you. The last… nine years. I do have memories. Some of them are… inaccurate.”
The sun is sinking behind the line of buildings across the street. A car horn sounds, and somebody shouts. It’s getting harder and harder to make out Sam’s face. He doesn’t speak; she thinks he’s going to, for a moment, but then he doesn’t. She remembers other hotel rooms at other times. A camping vacation that went to pieces: they ended up in a cheap roadway motel, sprung for an adjacent room for the kids so that she and Derek could quietly fuck with the TV on. Actually, that was a nice trip. Very nice. All four of them got along: united in failure. There was a trip to Derek’s parents’ place, the guest room under renovation (the guest room was always under renovation), the Best Western near the highway, with the indoor pool so overheated she fainted. They never seemed to plan to stay in hotels, they were only a substitute for real plans.
She says, “I remember Silas… dying. When he was fifteen. And then later, you’re happy. You’re not like this.” She has to squint against the sun. She says, “None of this seems real to me, Sam. There was no shrink. You live near us. We share a car.”
She says, “I want my Honda back, Sam.”
He is staring at her.
Elisa can’t stay upright anymore—it’s as if Sam’s gaze has released her. She lets herself lean toward the pillows, and then she’s lying down and her eyes are closed.
“Tell me things,” she says. “About yourself. Things I don’t know.”
He’s quiet for a while. She thinks she’s going to fall asleep, but her body is buzzing. Every now and then her fingers twitch, as if she’s grabbing something in a dream.
When he speaks, it’s with effort, as though he is forcing himself to play along. He says, “I don’t know. I assume you don’t remember the meeting.”
She shakes her head no.
“The family meeting? The one where you told us?”
Now she doesn’t want to hear it. But he has decided to tell her. He shifts his body on the chair, with effort, and when he speaks he is panting slightly.
“You scheduled it. Like it was a work meeting. It was at 5:00 p.m. on a weekday. Silas was off in his room coding or something. I was… I don’t know what I was doing.” He clears his throat, inhales through his nose like an old man. “You got us all around the dining room table and said basically you were kicking us out and were going to cut off contact for a while. And I said A while?, and Dad said Indefinitely. And Silas said, Who told you to do this, the shrink?, and you said, It’s something we worked on with Amos.”
“Oh, Sam…” she says.
“And Dad started rattling off the details, like we had two weeks to do this and a month to do that before you changed the locks, and Silas was just laughing and laughing. Because he had just heard about the job, like, that same day.”
“This one? The one…”
“At Infinite. And he was like, You know what, how about we leave today? Like, right now? And he got up from the table and started carrying his shit out to the car. You guys just sat there like, what the fuck? And I could see your expressions just start to harden, like you must have promised yourselves you were going to do, and I sat there asking you if it was a joke, or what.”
He has managed to drain his glass and pours himself another from the bottle on the floor.
“At some point Silas looked at me and said, Are you coming? And I looked at you and you just hung your head. Silas said, Can’t you see, dude, they’re done with you? Get up off your ass and pack. So I was like, fuck all this fucking shit, and I went with him.”
“Where did you go?” Elisa asks him.
“Some motel. Silas called some girls. We got drunk. After a couple of days we flew out here. They paid for everything—they wanted him really bad. They gave me a job. We bought the house.”
The room is quiet, but the air itself seems to be making a noise—a pink noise, a hiss with a low note in it somewhere. No, she realizes, it’s just the air conditioner. And this is a disappointment to her, she wanted it to be the air, the sound the air made.
“Why did we do it?” she whispers, mostly to herself. But he answers.
“We were acting like assholes.” And then, after a moment, “You were assholes. No, all of us are assholes, that’s the problem.” Sam is starting to sound drunk now, his teenage self is coming back, the self-pitying Sam, the whining Sam. She thinks, I’m an asshole for thinking that.
“Actually, that time, in the motel,” he says, too loudly, “I cheated on Angie with some girl, Silas’s girl’s girlfriend or something. We made the girls go down on each other then I fucked the one, the other one. I called Angie and told her and she dumped me. Then we moved.”
He wants to hurt her with this tableau of debauched sexuality. And she is hurt, but she is mostly confused. She says, “I don’t know who Angie is.”
There’s a silence. Finally, “We were together for years. We were supposed to get married?”
“I’m sorry, Sam. Why—”
“Whatever.”
She waits. He is panting, slumping in his chair. “Why did you call her? Tell her? Why were you… unfaithful?”
Sam doesn’t answer. He closes his eyes and for a time he seems to be asleep. But he keeps his half-full glass upright and when he opens his eyes again he appears alert.
“You’re not happy here. With Silas.”
He doesn’t respond.
“Surely it was about him, not you,” she says, willing it to be so, begging him to agree. “What we were doing, it was about Silas, about breaking his… his hold on you.”
The light in the room is lower now and illuminates the wall behind her. It reflects a green cast onto his face. He says, “I don’t know. No.”
“You could have been free of him.”
He’s quiet for a while. He says, “No. I came here. He… he got me a job. He took me in. Sort of like one of his girls.”
“His girls?” Elisa asks.
“Yeah, he—well, you met one. He dates messed-up girls. He tries to, I dunno, fix them or something. Help them. It never works out, it ends in tears, you know.”
“Maybe he’s just taking advantage of them, Sam. Did you ever think of that?”
His eyes narrow. He appears puzzled. “No—I don’t know what he’s doing, to be honest. But taking advantage. No. He’s not like that. With girls.”
Elisa thinks, you don’t know him like I do.
She consumes the contents of her glass in one gulp. There’s something she wants to ask him. She can’t. Then she does. “You… shared. Those girls. In the motel.”
He’s looking at the wall over her head.
“That girl,” she says. “The red-haired girl. Do you share her?”
He shifts in his seat, drinks. “No.”
“Sam, you don’t like girls.”
He’s very still now. Quietly he says, “What do you mean?”
“You don’t like girls. You’re gay.”
“I’m not gay.”
“Yes,” Elisa says, “you are. You came out. A few years after he died. You have a boyfriend. I think. You don’t tell me everything.”
The silence is much longer this time. She is in mourning now, mourning for the Sam she knows. Her friend, her only son.
His shoulders are hitching and his feet scrape against the floor. As if he’s bound to the chair and is trying to get free. His empty glass falls from his hand onto the carpet.
“Sam?”
There are tears in his voice as he says, “I’m cooking the books!”
She waits.
“Silas is—we tried to start our own company. His games don’t sell. You know—they’re supposed to be arty. People hate him here… it’s a fuckin’… it’s a miracle we’re not fired.”
He draws a deep breath and his throat sounds a low and wandering note, a wheeze. When he speaks again, he has reined in his emotions.
“Silas is… he doesn’t like working for somebody else. I mean, I can’t blame him. He wanted to go independent. He found a partner, we were going to go in together on this space in La Puente… so we started… skimming off the top. I mean, Silas felt like—we both did—like we deserved it. They really are assholes, these people. But the guy, the partner… he fuckin’ disappeared. We got robbed. It was so fuckin’ stupid…”
They sit there in the darkening room, facing each other, Elisa on the bed and Sam on the chair. She reaches out and takes his thick pale hands in hers.
“Just come home,” she says. “Leave it all behind.”
He snorts. “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”
“I mean it.”
“I can’t just leave. I’m the accountant. It was all his idea but I’m the one. I could go to jail. I gotta try to make it right. We’re living off of beans and rice.”
“How much have you taken, Sam?”
He shakes his hung head.
“Your father and I… we could help you out. If you just quit now. Quit now and come home.”
The shaking of his head, his shaggy head, slows and then stops. She has gazed at it, the whorls of fine hair, the hot slick skin, always a little oily, so many times in her life, every time she held him, comforted him. Whenever he was sick, whenever Silas hurt him. She wants to lean forward and kiss it, but holds back.
He says, “I still don’t understand why you’re here.”
“You’re my son. I love you.”
“The things you said…”
“I don’t remember!”
He withdraws his hands from hers, sits up straight, glares at her with his wet hard eyes. “That you couldn’t help me. I was beyond help. I was weak to follow him. That I was ruining your life.”
“No.”
“That’s what you said. You said I needed to break away. You’d be there if I decided to break away.”
“That’s what I’m saying now!” she cries.
“But you knew I wouldn’t.”
“Sam. I don’t understand.”
He’s silent.
Her hands are tangled in her hair; her voice breaks: “It isn’t supposed to be this way!”
But Sam is shaking his head again. “There’s no way anything is supposed to be,” he says. “Things can be as good or as bad as they want.”
He gets up and heads for the door. But then he turns back, leans over her, and kisses her on the cheek. “This is so bizarre and fucked up,” he whispers to her, “all of it.” He picks up the whiskey bottle, holds it up to the light. He slides it into his pocket and walks out.
41.
In the morning, after dreamless unrestful sleep, she gets up, dresses without showering, and leaves her room. It’s just after eight on a Saturday. Silas won’t be out; she can rouse him from bed. She’ll settle it with him. Come to some kind of agreement.
The air is cool, without a trace of moisture. Nothing is open but there’s traffic anyway, as if people are driving for its own sake. She’s walking briskly to combat the fatigue, her tennis shoes making no sound at all against the sidewalk, and it feels like the old life, tired and on the edge. She feels almost normal.
In the early light the house looks dumpier and more vulnerable. The gutters sag and the shingles are coming loose. She climbs the steps, tries the door, and when it proves to be locked she reaches for the bell. But she thinks better of it. Goes around to the back, lets herself into the yard through a low chain-link fence gate. A small screened back porch leads to another door, with a curtained window at eye level. She can make out a washer and dryer and part of the kitchen.
She tries this door, too, and it’s also locked. But inside a rusted coffee can, on a bookcase slumped against the back wall of the house, she finds a key. It feels too heavy in her hand, and too cool, as if it has borrowed these properties from some other object, in some other place.
Silas used to lock his bedroom door, would lock her out, as early as age two. They found a way to jimmy it open—a tiny screwdriver or tweezers in the hole in the knob—but eventually Silas discovered this and stole everything in the house that could conceivably be used for unlocking. Derek began to keep a collapsible screwdriver on his key ring, but around the time he turned seven or eight, Silas managed to get his hands on a safety bolt, which he installed crudely on his side of the door, bypassing the knob entirely. They could have removed this, too, of course, when he was at school. If she remembers right, they may even have done so, once or twice. But the real answer was to give up.
This turned out to be the answer to a lot of things, with Silas.
Well, here are the results. They are cynical and unhappy here, on their own, and she and Derek are delusional and unhappy at home. She has created a family of miserable loners who seem incapable of helping one another.
Was there anything she could have done that would have resulted in a satisfactory outcome?
She needs to believe that the answer is no.
She slides the key into the lock, and a moment later she is standing in the messy kitchen, her heart pounding. Breaking and entering. But this isn’t her real life, is it. This is where things are different. She is seeing if she can make things change. Hands shaking, she sets the key on the counter.
The house is quiet. She moves into the living room, which is as disorderly as the kitchen. The fingerprinted residue of cocaine smears the coffee table’s filthy glass surface. Cut up plastic drinking straws and a razor blade. There’s a wad of Kleenex stained by blood and an ashtray filled with cigarette butts and the twisted paper ends of joints.
A hallway leads away from here and she walks down it. The bathroom door is open, and three others are closed. No light is visible beneath one—a closet. She takes a breath and opens the next.
It is hard to imagine a sadder sight. Sam is lying asleep and fully clothed on an unmade bed, the sheets twisted together and trailing across the carpet, where movie and gaming magazines are spread within easy reach. The dresser drawers are all open and unfolded laundry spills out, mingling with the dirty shirts and pants that litter the floor. There’s a smell of sweat and shit and come, and nothing hangs on the walls. The window shade is up. It looks out on an overgrown half-dead shrub and beyond it the back of another house.
She withdraws, pulls the door shut, then stands in the hallway drawing and releasing steady breaths. She remembers the game, Silas’s game, a scene in which she walked through an empty apartment, with the intent of finding something, a handwritten letter, in a drawer. In her memory the experience seems real, no different from her memories of things she has actually done. If she stayed here, standing in the hallway, doing nothing, then nothing would happen, forever. This is how she feels. The world suddenly is very limited. So little seems possible—almost nothing, when you get down to it. She is struck suddenly by a powerful conviction, that she will exhaust this world’s potentiality soon—that she will reach a city wall, or a high cliff, or a door that won’t open, there will be nothing beyond this obstacle, and that will be the end. She can feel the membrane that separates this stunted
universe from the next; for a moment it seems as though she can actually see it, the faint curvature of the circular world as it swallows its tail, closes in, sealing itself off from the horror of infinity. Her hand reaches out and finds the wall; the coarse unsanded surface feels very real. She walks to the end of the hall and opens the last door.
It is, by contrast, incredibly tidy. There are several computer screens set up on an angled desk, a case of reference books, an Oriental rug half covering a hardwood floor. The bed is made with bright red sheets, and the girl is curled underneath them, her red hair and cheek anemic-looking against the pillowcase. Beside her Silas is sitting up, his shirtless back against the headboard, with a paperback book in his hand. On his face is an expression of profound surprise.
Elisa feels a surge of excitement, almost joy. She stares at him. Then she turns and goes back to the kitchen and sits down at the table.
Silas appears a minute later, wearing boxer shorts and a clean white tee shirt. He has recovered from his astonishment. He says, “What the fuck.”
“Sit down,” she says, and the conviction in her voice surprises her; it does not match her emotions. “We have something to discuss.”
He appears vulnerable here, without a drink in his hand. He’s thin, she can see that he’s unhealthy. But his eyes are alive with calculation.
After a moment he pulls out a chair and sits. On the counter behind him stands the object that preoccupied her yesterday, the mason jar filled with brown liquid. She intends to make demands, arrangements, to save his brother. Instead she says, “What is that?”
He frowns, turns, looks around. When he turns back to her, he’s angry: she has surprised him again. “What’s what?”
“That.” She points. “In the jar.”
Clearly he doesn’t want to turn again, doesn’t want to be tricked or thrown off balance. But he can’t help it, he looks.
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