Robert Lennon - Familiar

“Stop, stop. I know this, you don’t need to do this.”

“—and he smashed them on the table until one broke. And he cut himself, cut his hand,” Derek says, gazing levelly at her, “and I hit him, didn’t I. Open-handed across the cheek. I knocked him over.”

“It’s all right,” she says, “stop.”

“And raised bruises on his face.”

“Derek,” she says. “Stop, please.” He is staring at her, slack-jawed. Elisa feels a deep sympathy for him: he had been looking forward to this day, the dinner, the wine, going to bed. She has fucked everything up for no clear reason. Now he shrugs. He’s finished with the story.

Of course she remembers it, too. When Silas smashed the glasses, he flinched — Derek flinched, but he didn’t cry out, and he didn’t shout. Instead he stood up, leaned over Silas, drew his arm back. Elisa thought, Do it. And he did. A moment later Silas lay on the floor, broken glass around and beneath him, the first expression of genuine surprise they had seen on his face in months. Silas cried this time, for sure. Then Sam, then Elisa. Then Derek.

He says, “Why are you doing this.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“There had better be a goddamn good reason.” He leans back, covers his face with his hands. “A stroke, Lisa? You didn’t have a stroke. ”

“I thought…”

“Something happened. You met somebody.”

“No, no.”

“Then what.” His voice muffled by his fingers.

She says, “I can’t explain, not yet. There’s no one else.” Though there is, there’s Larry.

He’s waiting.

“Just tell me about one more thing. One more. From later.”

It takes a moment for him to react. To understand, evidently, that she needs him to agree to hear her question. His hands slide off his face and lie limp at his sides. “All right,” he says.

She has grown cold now, even in the flannel nightshirt, and she bunches her hands into fists and shoves them together into her lap. “When the boys were fifteen and sixteen,” she says.

“Okay.”

She hesitates a moment before saying, quietly, “Was there a crash? In a van?”

She expects him to gape, shake his head in disappointment, walk out of the room. Or, Of course there was, he nearly died, why are you doing this? But instead he only blinks. He is bewildered.

“A crash?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t… no. No? I don’t remember a crash.”

“Silas was in a band, a rock band with a guy named Ricky. He was older, he was in his twenties. And that boy Kevin.”

“Uh huh,” he says, but he doesn’t remember. And then he does. “Oh,” he says. “They were in a crash. They were playing chicken or something?”

“Yes!”

“And they died, some people died.”

“Yes, yes. And Silas?”

“Silas? There was a funeral, we tried to get him to go. He wouldn’t go.”

She says, “He had nothing to do with the crash? He wasn’t in the van?”

He coughs out a little laugh. “No!”

“Nothing happened then. To Silas. Around that time.”

“Well,” Derek says after a moment, “there was his lost weekend. Was that before or after the van thing?”

She wants to say “Lost weekend?” but bites it back. Derek goes on.

“I barely remember the van thing, I can’t tell you when that was.”

She says, “Tell me about the lost weekend. I want to know how you remember it.”

The eyes again narrow. When he speaks, she can tell that he’s had nearly enough of this game: he’s going to quit soon. He says, “All right, well, he left school that Thursday afternoon and didn’t come back. Somebody saw him out in the parking lot, smoking, as though he was waiting for somebody — I remember the school secretary told you that, on the phone. And then we didn’t see him again until Monday night.” He is staring at her. “Monday night? Is that right?”

“I think so,” she says, quietly.

“The police were looking for him, we took turns driving all over town — I think we were out all night two nights running, then we just couldn’t stay awake anymore. I canceled my appointments Monday, and we just sat at home, waiting. You said, ‘He’s never coming back.’”

“I did?”

There is a tightness to his voice when he says, “Yes, you did.” He pauses. “I thought so too. As you well know. As we have discussed many times, alone and with Amos.”

She does not ask who Amos is, though she wants to. Then she wonders if this is a test, if there is no Amos, and she is supposed to ask who he is. But no, why would he do that? In any event, Derek has moved on.

“He never said where he’d been. But he’d lost weight — he looked terrible and reeked of cigarettes and body odor. He appeared, in every respect, homeless. His school attendance was poor after that. He rarely spoke. Then I got my job offer and we moved here, and entered into the next phase of our strange life together, Lisa.”

He’s angry. She turns away from him, looks out the window, into the darkness; superimposed over the glass, her face looks heavy and old.

Derek gets up, delivers his empty beer bottle into the kitchen. When he returns he passes by the sofa and climbs the stairs to bed. Halfway up, he turns. “I still think there’s somebody else,” he says. “I think this was all about the third rule.”

She doesn’t know what this means.

He waits.

“I’m sorry. The third… I’m forgetting…”

His mouth turns down in a way that she recognizes from the real Derek, the one she knows. Polite displeasure. He thinks he is being mocked.

“Refusing. You refused.”

She says, “Refused…”

Angry now: “Intimacy.”

“I don’t—” But now she is just making it worse. His shoulders and jaw are tensed.

“You fell in love with somebody, and you thought you could come home and pretend it never happened, but you couldn’t. You panicked.” He shakes his head. “A stroke. ”

“It’s not like that. That’s not what’s happening.”

“So what’s happening ?”

Elisa’s throat is half-closed, and her voice is strangled when she says, “I don’t know!”

He twitches, as if he’s about to reply. And then she watches him master himself — the eyes close, the muscles relax. He lets out breath. “I love you,” he says, quietly and with resignation, then turns and continues on his way. A few moments later she hears the mattress groan underneath him.

It’s an hour before she is able to join him, and another before she sleeps. The first day is over.

She’s awake at four thirty. She is lying in the bed beside Derek, not touching him; his chest rises and falls in the gloom but he makes no sound. She permits herself a moment of hoping that yesterday never happened, or was a dream, but this is folly, even lying still she can feel herself occupying the wrong body.

Out of bed, down the stairs. The carpet bothers her now, it’s like she’s still in bed. The place smells different here — synthetic, unlived-in.

In this life, there’s a laptop computer sitting on the kitchen island. Maybe it’s just where Derek does his work. But she doesn’t think so — he has his study. The computer must be hers. Beside it lies the binder she brought back from the conference that she has no memory of. As the computer boots she opens the binder, stares at the pages, at the printed-out e-mails. Her palms are sweating, her feet are cold, her behind hurts where it meets the hard wooden kitchen stool. She feels hung over.

She has to make a decision.

When the computer is ready, she brings up the SUNY Reevesport website, finds the biology department, reads about it. (They have wireless internet in this life, like a normal professional family.) It’s fairly well regarded, particularly for plant biology. She recognizes some of the names of faculty members — people whom she has encountered through her lab in the old life. There’s a guy who did some important work on fungi, another who is an expert on fatty acids in seeds, and won an award for it.