Robert Lennon - Familiar

Is the girl drugged? There is no expression on the face; the eyes blink with exaggerated slowness. Elisa doesn’t move — she wants to leave, but this would somehow be worse, a greater invasion of privacy than remaining still. Her ankle itches and her bladder feels heavy.

Finally the girl closes her eyes and rolls over and returns, evidently, to sleep. Her legs are sinewy, her feet large. Elisa watches her draw and exhale breath.

What precisely does she think she is doing here on this porch, in this city, interfering in lives she has evidently forsaken? Muscling this world onto some path where perhaps it doesn’t belong. She’s doesn’t have a plan, not really. She is still groping, still doesn’t belong.

But she felt this way, often, in her real life, too, didn’t she? It was the signature emotion of parenthood. There was no way to know what actions had which results, whether all of it was her fault, or none of it.

She has been assuming that her memories of life before the crash are valid here, but maybe they aren’t. Is any memory valid, really? Has she ever remembered anything the way it really happened? Has anyone, ever?

Maybe none of this world belongs to her. None of it.

She climbs down from the porch and wanders the streets, sweating. The light glinting off car windshields is again too bright. A greasy haze of unreality coats everything. She suddenly feels sick, as if the coffee she drank has just changed its mind, and she sits down on a curb over a street grate, expecting to vomit. But the feeling passes and is replaced by exhaustion. She finds her way back to the motel and asks the clerk to call and wake her at seven fifteen, but the clerk shakes her head and says it’s all computerized, just push the wake-up button on the phone.

Elisa’s hand is trembling as she does this, sitting on the edge of the bed, on the slick synthetic-fiber comforter that will not allow her body to find any purchase. When the operation is finished, she throws back the bedclothes and climbs in, shivering and fully dressed. Falling asleep makes a sound in her mind like a steel marble circling the drain.

Two hours later she stands on the sidewalk again looking up at the bungalow. The driveway is full now; Sam’s SUV is here, a small sports car, an old Volvo, and a motorcycle. Long shadows of palm trees and phone poles rake the street. Her breathing is quick and shallow and she wants to run away. But she climbs the steps for the second time that day and knocks on the door.

Sam answers. His body fills the doorway. There’s a large glass of something in his hand, whiskey she supposes, with a couple of half-melted ice cubes floating in it. He manages a small smile that quickly fades. “You don’t have to do this,” he says, and she can detect in him, for the first time, some small reservoir of compassion. She thinks, This is really happening. This is how things are.

She says, “I came all this way.”

After a moment, he steps aside and lets her in.

People, young people, fill the living room. Each holds a drink in one hand — straight-sided glass tumblers of something — and a cigarette in the other. They embrace no recognizable style. One boy looks like the counterpart of the girl at the motel — black jeans and tee shirt, piercings and wild hair. Another wears suit pants and an untucked oxford shirt and tiny round glasses with lenses not much larger than his eyes. There are a couple of guys who look like members of a biker gang — she recognizes one of them from photos of the Infinite Games staff. A fat girl with big breasts stands alone by the wall. And the girl from earlier is here, wearing a simple, baggy linen dress that is too big for her. Its hem drags on the floor.

It isn’t that any of them is particularly unusual, set against the strangeness of humanity; taken alone, any one would qualify, at first blush, as mildly eccentric. But there is something abstracted about them as a group; the party seems conceptual, like a movie set. It is as if none of them knows any of the others, as if they have all just met.

Sam comes up behind her and says, loudly, “Everyone, this is Lisa.”

A few people turn and say hello. The fat girl actually appears frightened.

She is trying to decide, in the half-quiet that follows Sam’s introduction, whether or not to reply when a figure appears in the kitchen doorway, holding its own drink and cigarette. It is unmistakably Silas. His eyes travel first to the red-haired girl, and then follow her gaze to Elisa.

In spite of everything, she wants to cross the room and embrace him. Oh, Silas — I know you so well. Every year, in that motel room in Wisconsin, she has lain on the bed, eyes closed, and imagined what he would look like if he were alive. She has invented a hundred scenarios for him — lives he could lead, experiences that might transform him. He has been rich, he has been imprisoned. He has been married, itinerant, famous, missing.

She never imagined this one, of course.

Silas is advancing toward her across the room. The party has lost interest in her, conversation has resumed, but she can’t shake the feeling that everyone is watching, that they all know what she has done, what has happened to her, what is going through her head. That they are witnesses to an experiment of which she is the subject.

He is standing before her now. It’s him. “Lisa,” he says.

His body is strong — that’s what strikes her. Always, as a child, he was smaller than his brother, slighter. He is wiry now, muscled. He looks like he could climb up a wall, jump from rooftop to rooftop.

And his face, it is so familiar: the expression of impassivity, the features flattened by indifference, as though pressed against bulletproof glass. His eyes are half-lidded, his small mouth opened slightly, the skin tanned and lightly coated with sweat. He is twenty-four years old. She flinches when he takes one of her hands in both of his, lifts it to his thin lips, touches it to them. They are warm and dry.

“Silas…”

His eyes open wider and meet hers. They seem to know that she isn’t his real mother. He releases her hand and it falls to her side. “Would you like anything to drink?” he asks. She can’t read his tone.

“All right,” she says.

His eyes bore into her, then blink. He doesn’t ask her what drink she wants. He just turns and walks back toward the kitchen, with a spring in his step. She remembers him as a toddler, the sight of his small hard back retreating through a doorway or around the corner of a room, the feeling that something just out of sight was about to happen, something would be… disrupted.

There is a presence beside her and she remembers that Sam is here. That Sam exists. He’s breathing loudly again, loudly enough to hear against the background noise of the party. She turns to him and he is gazing at her with mild curiosity and apparent exhaustion. His glass is empty except for the ice cubes, which are little more than slivers now. His face is red and puffy and she realizes that he is an alcoholic. Silas is doing this to you. I did this to you.

Sam turns away and follows his brother, heaving himself across the room. Elisa is left alone at the door. She can see the boys moving in the kitchen. She doesn’t want to be standing here when they come out.

Everyone in the room is half her age, but they seem older somehow. She stumbled into parties like this in college — disdainful or insecure people, trying to act cool. She liked the law students for their politeness, their confidence. They were invested in the system, they felt comfortable there. Elisa never thought of herself as a misfit — she didn’t like misfits.

Having children changed that. The pitying way other parents looked at her when Silas pushed their kids or stole their toys. She understood the outsider mentality. It came in handy in her old life, her real life, where she painted paintings and had extramarital affairs. She feels compelled to let these people know — I’ve been loathed and pitied, too. I paint paintings.