Robert Lennon - Familiar

“Sam did?”

“Let go of me, Derek.”

“And that’s what he wanted,” Derek said, almost to himself. “To make you slap Sam.”

“Let go of my arms.”

“Are you sure?”

Die, you fucking fuck. “I have to apologize to Sam.”

“You won’t go into Silas’s room.”

“Derek,” she said between clenched teeth. “Let fucking go of me.”

He did as she asked, slowly, as if she might spring up and attack him, and she climbed the stairs and apologized to her son. This would be the first time they almost decided to separate, she and Derek, the first of three. The second was right before Silas calmed down, right before he started doing well in school; and then there was the one right before his death.

They should have broken up sooner. Their love for each other was not important, but this wasn’t clear to them at the time. They just wanted to be with the only other person who understood, whatever the consequences.

“He made me,” Sam whispered to her that night, tears on his cheeks. “I know,” she whispered back, “I’m sorry,” and rocked him to sleep.

Two weeks later he turned seven.

She tries to keep a steady voice, though her throat is tight and the words come out strained. “I see what you do, Silas. Online.”

“Online?” She has caught him off guard. His face is long, bony, a man’s face, not a boy’s, and the word massive occurs to her, though he is not large. He is simply her son, a man.

“The forums you’re on. You treat people badly. You invent new versions of yourself just so you can treat people badly.”

Silas’s eyes widen and he barks out a laugh. “You’re webstalking me?”

She hears a noise behind her and in a moment feels a hand on her arm. It’s Sam. “Mom.”

“That is really something,” Silas is saying. “I’m not nice enough to people. On the internet! Did you catch that? I’m a dick on the internet, and Lisa has flown out to LA to let me know.”

“We ought to go,” Sam is whispering.

“Listen to your good son, Lisa, he’s right. You ought to go.”

But I don’t want to go, she’s thinking. This is what I came for. Although it occurs to her that, ultimately, she doesn’t really know what she came for. Except to see. Her eyes fall from her son’s face to the counter, where the liquid in the jar is still swirling, though no one has touched it. The liquid is pearlescent. It appears to be illuminated from within. And she wonders, ludicrously, and for no clear reason at all, is this part of an experiment Silas is doing, part of his effort to create other universes? Perhaps it is in this kitchen’s twin, in another universe, that he created this one. And now, from inside this universe, he is trying to create another. That’s it, in the jar, that’s the matter that will expand into it. Ten pounds of matter, Betsy told her, packed into a really tiny space. She wants to reach over and pick up the jar, see how heavy it is. She looks down at her glass and sees that it is nearly empty.

Silas is staring at her. If he has noticed her noticing the jar, he gives no sign. She allows Sam to lead her out of the room, through the crowd of people, out of the house. She’ll come back. She needs to pick that thing up, to heft it and peer into its depths. The red-haired girl is nowhere to be seen. Elisa leaves her glass on the table on the porch, beside the ashtray and lighter.

Down the front steps and onto the sidewalk. Sam is marching her along the street, his fingers tight around her arm. She says, “Sam. Let go.”

He releases her, tosses the arm back to her. It flops against her side. “I told you not to come.” They’re walking fast, toward her motel.

“That girl,” Elisa says. “What’s wrong with her?”

“She’s Silas’s.” Dismissively, as though this makes speculation pointless.

When they reach the motel he follows her into her room. The curtains are open and the evening sun is blazing through the window, but the room still seems dark, and the air is clammy. Sam turns the air conditioner down. He has brought something with him, in his pocket, a bottle of whiskey the size of a beer. Elisa sits down on the bed and watches him unwrap the two tumblers from the tray on the nightstand and pour a few fingers of liquor into each. He still has great facility with his body, when he isn’t around his brother. She remembers the towers of blocks he liked to make, such irresistible invitations to Silas. Even long after it became clear these projects would not survive his brother’s attention, he continued to build and defend them. He would spend hours beside a tower of blocks, his body taut with attention as Silas walked by.

Sam takes the only chair in the room, facing her, and hands her one of the glasses. He says, “You have to tell me what you want.”

She drinks. “I just wanted to see you.”

“What did he think?”

His enunciation of the word he —an emphasis half mockery and half vestigial respect — tells her that he is referring to Derek. “I don’t know.”

“And the therapist guy. Who you hired to do all this to you.”

“You know about all that?”

Sam doesn’t respond.

“I didn’t tell him I was coming, Sam. The therapist, I mean. I just came.” Though she remembers, moments later, that she is lying. When he doesn’t respond, she says, “I needed to see you.”

“Is this amnesia thing a real thing, or is it just bullshit?”

She leans over to place the glass on the nightstand. She doesn’t want it. She says, “It’s real.”

“You honestly have no memory of, what exactly?”

“I told you. The last… nine years. I do have memories. Some of them are… inaccurate.”

The sun is sinking behind the line of buildings across the street. A car horn sounds, and somebody shouts. It’s getting harder and harder to make out Sam’s face. He doesn’t speak; she thinks he’s going to, for a moment, but then he doesn’t. She remembers other hotel rooms at other times. A camping vacation that went to pieces: they ended up in a cheap roadway motel, sprung for an adjacent room for the kids so that she and Derek could quietly fuck with the TV on. Actually, that was a nice trip. Very nice. All four of them got along: united in failure. There was a trip to Derek’s parents’ place, the guest room under renovation (the guest room was always under renovation), the Best Western near the highway, with the indoor pool so overheated she fainted. They never seemed to plan to stay in hotels, they were only a substitute for real plans.

She says, “I remember Silas… dying. When he was fifteen. And then later, you’re happy. You’re not like this.” She has to squint against the sun. She says, “None of this seems real to me, Sam. There was no shrink. You live near us. We share a car.”

She says, “I want my Honda back, Sam.”

He is staring at her.

Elisa can’t stay upright anymore — it’s as if Sam’s gaze has released her. She lets herself lean toward the pillows, and then she’s lying down and her eyes are closed.

“Tell me things,” she says. “About yourself. Things I don’t know.”

He’s quiet for a while. She thinks she’s going to fall asleep, but her body is buzzing. Every now and then her fingers twitch, as if she’s grabbing something in a dream.

When he speaks, it’s with effort, as though he is forcing himself to play along. He says, “I don’t know. I assume you don’t remember the meeting.”

She shakes her head no.

“The family meeting? The one where you told us?”

Now she doesn’t want to hear it. But he has decided to tell her. He shifts his body on the chair, with effort, and when he speaks he is panting slightly.