Robert Lennon - Familiar

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.

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, alternately, 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.