Familiar

by J. Robert Lennon

  “That’s what he used to say. Like, all excited. For the adrenaline rush. We were going out looking for girls.”

  This man Samuelson was a high school dropout. He played the drums in local bands. Silas had learned to play bass and was in one of the bands. The other boys in the van were band members. Samuelson, it emerged, hung around with schoolboys in order to attract underage girls. He and his companions would pair up with the girls and have sex with them in the van. The van was full of candles and incense and drugs. Apparently Samuelson liked to watch the younger boys having sex with their girls, while he was having sex with his.

  On this night, they never made it to the girls. A police cruiser was patrolling the factory grounds and pulled into the end of the alley.

  “And why didn’t Mr. Samuelson stop when he saw the police car?”

  “Objection,” said the defense attorney.

  “Did you notice anything about Mr. Samuelson that would indicate why he didn’t stop?”

  “He had his eyes closed,” said Kevin Framus.

  “Did he always have his eyes closed when he drove down the alley?”

  “Every time I was with him.”

  “And you never objected?”

  “I figured what was the harm. I never saw anybody back there.”

  “Did you see the police car on the night in question?”

  “No, I was in back.”

  “And so you didn’t try to stop Mr. Samuelson.”

  “No. Silas did. He never came with us before.”

  “And so he didn’t know about Mr. Samuelson’s habit of driving behind the brick factory with his eyes closed.”

  “No. This was the first time he came. Silas wasn’t… he didn’t like this kind of thing. He didn’t like to, like, hang out. He liked to do stuff. He was pissed at Ricky that we were just, you know, fucking around.” To the judge he said, “Sorry.”

  “All right,” the prosecutor said. “And how did Silas react when he saw the police car?”

  “He started shouting at Ricky to stop.”

  “But Mr. Samuelson didn’t stop.”

  “No. Silas was grabbing for Ricky when we hit. He got up and he was between the seats.” He paused. “Silas didn’t belong there. He was… we were idiots. Silas was all right.”

  “And when the van struck the police cruiser, he was thrown through the windshield.”

  “I guess. I didn’t open my eyes until after.”

  “Did Silas say anything about the police cruiser? Did he specifically tell Mr. Samuelson that the cruiser was there?”

  “I really don’t remember. It was just screaming. I don’t remember.”

  “Do you have any idea why Mr. Samuelson didn’t listen? Why he didn’t open his eyes and look?”

  The defense attorney didn’t object. He was staring at Kevin Framus. He seemed to want to know the answer himself.

  Framus said, “I don’t know. I just…” He paused, seemed to consider a moment. “Honestly? I always figured he didn’t really have his eyes closed all the way. Otherwise how could he keep it straight? He never scraped the wall or whatnot. It was always straight down the middle.”

  “So he was just pretending to close his eyes.”

  “Yeah. He’d make little slits, you know. He didn’t really close them.”

  “So you think he knew the police car was there.”

  The defense attorney seemed to wake up. He objected, flailing his arms in the air.

  This Samuelson was the kind of person nobody knew but would pretend to have done so later, after it was all over. That he was bad news, a notorious town character. In truth he was more or less anonymous, a cipher. The police didn’t have him on their radar. It was the trial that taught Madison about him, and a few weeks after it was all over they would forget entirely. The trial revealed his insistence that nothing more than white cotton briefs be worn by band members during rehearsal, the suspicious fire that claimed his childhood home and the lives of his mother and sister, his dishonorable discharge from the Army. They learned about his bust for cocaine possession.

  For Elisa and Derek’s part, they had met the man once. They hadn’t thought well of him but agreed that the band was a good thing for Silas and that they should not interfere with his private life as long as it was legal and safe. It had been neither, but they didn’t know, and now he was dead.

  A few days after his trial began, Samuelson stopped breathing in the middle of the night, and then he was dead, too. The two police officers who were in the cruiser were treated for their injuries and recovered. Kevin Framus hadn’t been injured. He wasn’t charged with anything. Six months later his family moved away, and the family of the other dead boy moved away, then Elisa and Derek and Sam moved away, too, and that was the end of that.

  It was not the kind of thing that people remembered later. In Reevesport, maybe it would have been, but Madison is a big town, and more important things soon pushed it from memory. Indeed, except for the handful of acquaintances Elisa might run into on her visits, who could be forgiven for regarding her arrival as more of a burden than a pleasure, nobody thought about it much at all. It was just a thing that happened, and it was over now.

  12.

  But if Silas is alive, then it never did happen.

  She is lying on the bed, half-naked. Derek has covered her with a duvet and brought her a cup of tea before retreating back down the stairs. The tea is now cold and her head throbs without actually hurting. It’s growing dark outside.

  “Tell me when you’re ready to talk,” he said when he left the tea. She can’t imagine that moment arriving.

  The darkness deepens. She’s cold. She turns a lamp on long enough to confirm that none of her usual clothes are in the closet. Of course not. Some digging does reveal her favorite nightshirt, long and blue and covered with clouds, wadded into a ball in a far corner of the shelf. She undresses, allows herself a glance at her body in the mirror, hauls the musty shirt over it. What on earth could have made her stop liking it? Who is this woman?

  She goes to the door, opens it quietly, steps into the hall. She hears Derek shifting downstairs but he doesn’t call out. In the bathroom she rubs her face, examines it in the mirror. She is prettier here. This Lisa takes care to pretty herself. She strips off the nightshirt and then showers, careful to wash off all the makeup, not that there was much.

  Back in the hallway she pauses beside the incriminating photo. There are things she needs to see and do, to figure out, and she doesn’t know how much, if any, to explain to Derek. She recalls his earlier ardent affection and feels a kind of longing. But she doesn’t go downstairs.

  Instead she makes her way to the door of the room they called the box room. In the old life. When they moved in, they chose their bedrooms, she and Derek and Sam, and there was one left, the one that would have been Silas’s. Or, rather, it would have been Sam’s, as Silas, though the younger, would have taken the larger one, if he was alive.

  Or maybe not—if they gave Sam the choice, Silas could make him feel, somehow, that the larger was inferior. He could find a way to make Sam uncomfortable there, make him wish he had chosen differently. And so perhaps this room, the old life’s box room, is now, in fact, Silas’s.

  Of course the boys are grown now. They don’t live here. Or maybe they do and simply aren’t home? She is alarmed not to know this. In the old life, Sam has maintained his old room more or less as it was when he was in high school. He has left his posters up, kept his old mix CDs, the model airplanes he was obsessed with, belatedly, during the years he spent puzzling over his sexuality and his uneasy relationship with her and Derek. Even today, with a job and (she suspects) a boyfriend, he still hangs out there, in evident satisfaction, when he comes over; he still smokes cigarettes sitting cross-legged on the bed beside the open window, with earbuds in.

  Maybe he’s there now, in a world she evidently no longer inhabits. She misses him, that reality, suddenly, painfully. She hasn’t seen Sam for days—or, alternate
ly, for a lifetime.

  The box room was where they put Silas’s things. Derek had packed them, quite neatly, into plain cardboard boxes, and when they arrived here they chose a room for these things, and told the movers that anything unmarked should go in this room. Over time, the boxes were opened, rummaged through, crushed into corners or piled into stacks. Sam took what he wanted, music mostly, a stereo receiver and turntable and speakers, and took them to college and then later brought them back home. Derek removed some impersonal things—a radio, a lamp, a rug—and sold them at a yard sale. But the rest is still there, in the other life, along with other unwanted items, behind the always-closed door. Whenever one of them needs something from the box room, it is like entering a tomb that has been excavated from the floor of a desert. The stillness is so complete it seems to have a physical manifestation, like a liquid form of air.

  Hand on the doorknob, Elisa has a sudden memory of Silas at fourteen, in his room in Madison, music emanating from the walls, filling the house: ludicrously repetitive heavy metal songs (progressive metal, Silas would correct her), some of them more than ten minutes long, interrupted only by, alternately, the mumbling and shouting of a crazed lead singer. This is the music he did his homework to. It drove her nuts. How could anyone concentrate to that? (Derek: “Let us be glad he is doing homework.”) He listened at high volume, on vinyl records, sometimes for hours on end, transferred the records to recordable CDs and listened to those in the car or on headphones while he was walking around town or, presumably, the halls of his high school.

  Elisa had learned to tune it out, mostly anyway, while she was preparing dinner or trying to read, but one afternoon something about it was bothering her: the song that was playing had been playing too long, the words and chords repeating with uncanny precision. She stepped into the hall and concentrated. There: a hiccup in the progression, a missed beat. The record was skipping. It had been skipping for twenty minutes.

  “Silas!” She was banging on the door, but either he couldn’t hear or was ignoring her. Two singers, engaged in an incomprehensible conversation: Ah mutter-mutter-mutter. Ah mutter-mutter-mutter? Ah mutter. Ah mutter. Ah screaaaam! Ah screaaa— Ah mutter-mutter-mutter. Ah mutter-mutter-mutter? Ah mutter. Ah mutter. Ah screaaaam! Ah screaaa—

  “Silas!!”

  The door was flung open, the music belched out its full spectrum of loud, she could feel her teeth itch. He got right up in her face. “What!!”

  “Your! Record! Is skipping!” Elisa screamed now, to match his screaming, to overwhelm the singer’s.

  He appeared for a moment as though he might explode in anger at her, for criticizing, for daring to interrupt. But then his face went slack, his head tilted, his eyes unfocused, and he blinked. The record skipped.

  Silas almost smiled. It was funny, it really was. But something held him back. The eyes found her face, locked on, and his mouth tightened and he said, “Maybe I like it that way!” before slamming the door and, with a little scrape, lifting the music out of its closed loop.

  Something there that she missed. Some opportunity. She doesn’t know how she might have played it differently. Surely there was a way: they might have ended laughing.

  She opens the door and turns on the light.

  It’s a home office. There is a computer desk and a laptop and a small radio. Derek’s diploma is on the wall. The only boxes are sitting open on the floor, and they’re filled with files. A bookcase is lined with law books, Derek’s.

  In the old life, Derek doesn’t work at home. He stays late at work.

  Elisa backs out, turns off the light, closes the door. She goes to the other room, Sam’s room, and it isn’t Sam’s room, it’s a guest room. It is even tidier here than the rest of the house. There’s a brass bed and a caramel-colored bureau and signed prints of sentimental rural clichés: a basket, a barn, an owl. A large vase of dried flowers occupies a corner. The room bears the marks of Lorraine’s taste. So—in this life, Elisa has allowed Lorraine to decorate a room in her house. She can’t decide what this says about her—that she has no integrity, or that she has so much that she can allow such things without feeling insulted.

  Or maybe this Elisa likes Lorraine. Maybe they’re friends.

  She stands in the hallway for some time, just breathing and feeling her body against the nightshirt. Her feet are cold but the rest of her is warm from the shower and from the agitation of her mind. She has to face Derek, has to explain what just happened—the bathroom, the interruption of their lovemaking, the hospital, the non-stroke—and she is trying to determine how to do it.

  Eventually she walks down the stairs. Derek is there, on the sofa, and he smiles at her. He must have sneaked into their bedroom to change while she showered, because he’s wearing his pajama pants and bedroom slippers. There’s a beer on the table beside him and a law journal is open on his lap.

  “Are you all right?”

  She can hear, in his voice, the old irritation and doubt. He thinks she is hysterical, that nothing is wrong with her, that they went to the hospital for no reason. All these things may be more or less true.

  “I think so.”

  “Haven’t seen that in a while,” he says. He means the nightshirt.

  She sits down on the other end of the sofa and Derek closes the book and sets it on the table. He folds his hands together and faces her squarely, his eyes locked with hers. This gesture—this readiness to listen—is unfamiliar. And it occurs to her that he has to have learned it somewhere. Therapy? He has had therapy, or they have had it together.

  She says, “I need you to tell me our story.”

  13.

  He looks at her. He says, “Something happened at the conference.”

  “No.”

  “You’re not the same.”

  “I’ll try to explain. Maybe not right away. But first I need to hear everything up until now. From you.”

  He appears confused. “Everything since you came home?”

  “No. No. Everything. Our story. Since we met.”

  A kind of fear ripples across his face. He sighs, looks out the window, and it appears to be an effort for him to turn his head back to her. “‘Need.’”

  “What?”

  “It’s disturbing that you are coming back here and saying you need things from me. That you’re just asking for this and expect to get it.”

  She is eager to respond, to defend the request, but of course she can’t. She gazes at her own tightly folded hands in her lap and waits.

  “It’s your tone, Lisa. Making this demand. This weird demand.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He grunts, shifts his body. He doesn’t like the apology, either.

  But he says, “Okay. Our story. From when we met, that’s what you want?”

  She nods, puts her hand on his knee, withdraws it.

  He begins talking. Grudgingly at first, and not without sarcasm. But then he warms to it. It’s good to hear his voice. It’s like it was back when they met, hearing him late at night, talking about his family, trying to tell her everything. To fill her in, so that it would seem they’d always been together. Those first months, they barely slept. Friends mocked their tired eyes, made sexual jokes, but it was mostly talking, talking, talking that kept them awake. He’s telling her this now, and of course he is talking now the way he talked then, methodically, linearly, with the kind of confidence that renders editorializing as incontrovertible fact. He’s good. She doesn’t understand why he didn’t become a trial lawyer; he could convince anyone of anything. When they were young, this was bracing for her—the antidote to her parents’ equivocation and moral relativism. He said things he believed were true, as though they were true, and she accepted them. Then, in bed with him, listening, she laughed, thinking of her mother’s recurring admonishment: “Accept what is offered.” The trouble with that world was that nothing offered was ever any good: a ratty paperback book, marred by some anonymous fool’s notations; a flavorless stew; a heavily qualif
ied compliment (“Good work, but don’t get a big head about it”). Well, she accepted what Derek had to offer. Strong opinions, a strong body, a strong will. She opened herself up completely and let him pour in whatever he liked.

  He is enjoying himself now. “You were into me,” he is saying. “We were into each other.” And though he is deep in the past, and is not, she thinks, referring to the way things have changed, she understands that it is no longer so, that they are not into each other now. It isn’t merely the inevitable passing of desperate infatuation, the settling and hardening of love, it’s that they no longer dominate one another’s frame of reference. They are not the most interesting thing in each other’s lives.

  Derek says, “You were the only woman I’d ever known who actually listened to what I was saying. The way you concentrated. Even if you didn’t know what the hell I was talking about—you figured it out. You asked questions. I liked answering your questions.”

  He pauses, and his face flushes. Maybe because he has realized that’s what he’s doing now: answering her question. Or maybe because he is contemplating what he says next:

  “You fucked me. Not like other girls. You wanted it and you came and got it. You didn’t give a shit how that might look to me.”

  “It looked good to you,” she says.

  “It looked good to me.”

  Maybe too good, she thinks. He drew out the narcissist in her. The self she saw reflected in him, she came to mistake for her real self. She forgot how to desire things that weren’t him. She would blame him for this, later. Unfairly. Now, recalling that state, listening to his voice, feeling bad that she ever found fault with anything, she takes his hand in both of hers. He lets her do this. He tells her about his proposal (“You will marry me, won’t you?”), their wedding (family only, no church, which ought to have pleased everyone but pleased only the two of them), their first rental house, a crumbling bungalow two blocks from the Willy Street Co-op, with crooked floors, squirrels living under the roof, and mushrooms sprouting in between the bathtub and wall. Eventually that house was condemned, then collapsed on itself, folding spontaneously into the ground, a briefly famous neighborhood event.