Robert Lennon - Familiar

Instead of answering, she says, “It’s strange that he’s e-mailing at this hour.”

“It’s strange that you are.”

Their eyes meet. His hand reaches for a mug of coffee that isn’t there yet. Fluidly he transforms this motion into a gentle stroking of the table’s surface.

And just like that she would like to have sex with him. She is startled by the thought, and he seems to notice, and to notice what it is that caught her attention. He moves, just barely — the head cocked a fraction of an inch, the single eyebrow twitching over one eye. She closes the laptop, slides down off the stool, and walks out of the kitchen without a glance behind her. She takes off her nightgown on the way up the stairs. By the time she’s standing naked by the bed he has crossed the threshold of the bedroom, his robe billowing around him.

It’s quick and intense. His body is better here. Stronger. He doesn’t seem younger — indeed, he looks and feels his age. But this is better than the concealing softness of the other Derek. Her own, heavier body feels more erotic. She makes no sound other than a single deep involuntary groan.

For those moments there is nothing to apologize for and everything makes sense.

They lie beside each other, touching at the hip. Down in the kitchen, the coffeemaker beeps five times.

“You’re different,” he says, this time without hostility or accusation.

“Yes.”

“Do you know why?”

“Not entirely.”

For a moment she thinks he’s going to let it go. Then, “Do you want to tell me what part you know?”

“Not yet,” she says.

“Will you tell Amos?”

“No.”

Immediately she feels this is the wrong answer. Does it violate a rule? But he slides his hand up onto her hip and across her belly. Perhaps this is something they haven’t had together for some time: a small secret.

Two hours later they have eaten breakfast and drunk their coffee in comfortable silence. It’s almost possible to consider the situation normal. There’s a newspaper to read, so she stares at the words for a while, turns the pages. She tries and fails to empty her mind.

In the afternoon Derek goes out on errands. She opens her laptop and finds an email from Sam:

Mom

Nice hearing from you

No time/money to travel

Sorry

Sam

She reads the message several times. It feels heavy with meaning. After a few minutes’ thought, she writes back: I want to come see you. She sends it before she can change her mind.

A few minutes’ idle clicking later, she shuts the laptop, paces around the kitchen. They keep a phone list magneted to the fridge in the old life, but here there’s nothing. She opens and closes several drawers, then finds an address book — neatly maintained, implausibly, in her own hand — in the drawer under the phone. She looks under Brown and then Sam, and finds an address, two phone numbers.

She picks up the phone, stares at the keypad. Puts it down, goes to the front window. No Derek. Goes back to the phone and calls the first number.

There’s a click, and then she can hear a city street. For a moment, no one speaks.

Elisa says, “Hello?”

Sam says “Hi,” elongating it into a question.

“Are you all right?”

Another pause, and then, “Sure. Are you?”

“Yes. Yes, I’m fine.” Elisa lets out breath and experiences a moment of lightness, dizziness. Relief. She hasn’t understood until now just how anxious she has been, how terrified of this moment. And for what? That he wouldn’t be real. But here he is. She hears a car horn, voices speaking Spanish. “I’m sorry I’ve been… out of touch,” she says.

“Uh huh…”

“This must seem… it must be strange to hear from me.”

“Yeah… yeah…”

“Thanks for your e-mail. Did you get mine? I guess you didn’t, I just sent it.”

“Oh really?”

“I want to come to see you.” She hesitates. “You and your brother.”

He doesn’t respond to that. He seems to be speaking to someone else — buying something at a store, perhaps. Somebody thanks him in a foreign accent. After a moment, she goes on.

“I hope that he hasn’t… I hope Silas isn’t… hurting you, Sam. Or making things… harder for you.”

There’s a long pause. Elisa feels the need to fill it.

“I realize that things haven’t been good between us. For a while now. I… want to rectify that. Start to rectify that. If you’ll let me. Some things have happened to me—” And here, she is suddenly and unexpectedly moved, and her throat closes. She has to pause. She takes a breath, says, “Some things have happened to, to change the way I see my life. And I need to try to make things right. With you and Silas.”

He laughs, but it’s fake — forced.

“Sam?”

“ That guy.” The voice has changed now.

Elisa says, “I don’t—”

“Silas.”

Here in the kitchen, she becomes aware of the ticking of the wall clock, and it seems very loud. Her voice is very loud, even though she is nearly whispering. “Is there a problem with—”

“That guy is such a dick. Seriously. He’s so mean to me.”

A chill goes through her. The receiver creaks in her hand: she is holding it tight enough to break it.

The voice that comes out of it says, “He’s so mean! I hate him. I wish he would just leave me alone.”

She says nothing.

“Boo hoo hoo,” says the voice.

“Silas,” Elisa says.

“I do hope you’ll visit, Mom. Maybe you can tell him to stop bothering me? He never listens to me. Whoops,” he says, “gotta run. It was great talking to you!” And the conversation is ended with a click.

She has just spoken to her dead son on the phone.

Forty-five minutes later, the sound of Derek’s truck rouses her from sleep. She is on the sofa, her head tipped back on the cushions at a strange angle. Her neck hurts. Derek walks in and his body language communicates disapproval. He dislikes napping in general. In the other life, he overcame this prejudice, with effort. She sits up. “Hi.”

“You’re not getting enough sleep.”

“No, I guess not. Where were you?”

“Home Depot,” he says. He’s wearing a very clean pair of jeans and an old tee shirt and standing on the living room carpet with a plastic sack dangling from his hand. It is about to start to seem strange, his standing there, when he lets out a small grunt and sits down. He drops the bag on the floor and takes her numb hands into his. “This morning,” he says, “was nice.”

“Yes.”

“I want you to go see Amos. Please.”

She makes herself sit up, cranes her neck, trying to get the kink out. Derek releases her hands and begins to rub her shoulders.

“Thank you.”

“Will you go?”

She wants to answer him, but it’s as though the whole charade has hit a wall. She exhales, feeling his hands on her. Her throat tightens and her breath catches and she tells herself that she isn’t going to cry.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “This is… everything has gone insane this week. I don’t understand what’s happening.”

“We have to put this behind us,” she says, finally. A shot in the dark. “Amos. Everything.”

Her eyes are closed, she can’t see his reaction. But there is despair in his voice as he says, “I don’t understand how you can say that.”

“We can do it. We have done it.”

“I haven’t. I haven’t, not yet.”

But she meant in the other life. For a moment she wants, very badly, to tell him. To come clean. She remembers how it felt last night, the secret between them, the information she planned to conceal from Amos. A path to a new life, a third one, that begins right now.