Robert Lennon - Familiar

“You scheduled it. Like it was a work meeting. It was at 5:00 p.m. on a weekday. Silas was off in his room coding or something. I was… I don’t know what I was doing.” He clears his throat, inhales through his nose like an old man. “You got us all around the dining room table and said basically you were kicking us out and were going to cut off contact for a while. And I said A while? and Dad said Indefinitely. And Silas said, Who told you to do this, the shrink? and you said, It’s something we worked on with Amos.”

“Oh, Sam…” she says.

“And Dad started rattling off the details, like we had two weeks to do this and a month to do that before you changed the locks, and Silas was just laughing and laughing. Because he had just heard about the job, like, that same day.”

“This one? The one…”

“At Infinite. And he was like, You know what, how about we leave today? Like, right now? And he got up from the table and started carrying his shit out to the car. You guys just sat there like, what the fuck? And I could see your expressions just start to harden, like you must have promised yourselves you were going to do, and I sat there asking you if it was a joke, or what.”

He has managed to drain his glass and pours himself another from the bottle on the floor.

“At some point Silas looked at me and said, Are you coming? And I looked at you and you just hung your head. Silas said, Can’t you see, dude, they’re done with you? Get up off your ass and pack. So I was like, fuck all this fucking shit, and I went with him.”

“Where did you go?” Elisa asks him.

“Some motel. Silas called some girls. We got drunk. After a couple of days we flew out here. They paid for everything — they wanted him really bad. They gave me a job. We bought the house.”

The room is quiet, but the air itself seems to be making a noise — a pink noise, a hiss with a low note in it somewhere. No, she realizes, it’s just the air conditioner. And this is a disappointment to her, she wanted it to be the air, the sound the air made.

“Why did we do it?” she whispers, mostly to herself. But he answers.

“We were acting like assholes.” And then, after a moment, “You were assholes. No, all of us are assholes, that’s the problem.” Sam is starting to sound drunk now, his teenage self is coming back, the self-pitying Sam, the whining Sam. She thinks, I’m an asshole for thinking that.

“Actually, that time, in the motel,” he says, too loudly, “I cheated on Angie with some girl, Silas’s girl’s girlfriend or something. We made the girls go down on each other then I fucked the one, the other one. I called Angie and told her and she dumped me. Then we moved.”

He wants to hurt her with this tableau of debauched sexuality. And she is hurt, but she is mostly confused. She says, “I don’t know who Angie is.”

There’s a silence. Finally, “We were together for years. We were supposed to get married?”

“I’m sorry, Sam. Why—”

“Whatever.”

She waits. He is panting, slumping in his chair. “Why did you call her? Tell her? Why were you… unfaithful?”

Sam doesn’t answer. He closes his eyes and for a time he seems to be asleep. But he keeps his half-full glass upright and when he opens his eyes again he appears alert.

“You’re not happy here. With Silas.”

He doesn’t respond.

“Surely it was about him, not you,” she says, willing it to be so, begging him to agree. “What we were doing, it was about Silas, about breaking his… his hold on you.”

The light in the room is lower now and illuminates the wall behind her. It reflects a green cast onto his face. He says, “I don’t know. No.”

“You could have been free of him.”

He’s quiet for a while. He says, “No. I came here. He… he got me a job. He took me in. Sort of like one of his girls.”

“His girls?” Elisa asks.

“Yeah, he — well, you met one. He dates messed-up girls. He tries to, I dunno, fix them or something. Help them. It never works out, it ends in tears, you know.”

“Maybe he’s just taking advantage of them, Sam. Did you ever think of that?”

His eyes narrow. He appears puzzled. “No — I don’t know what he’s doing, to be honest. But taking advantage. No. He’s not like that. With girls.”

Elisa thinks, you don’t know him like I do.

She consumes the contents of her glass in one gulp. There’s something she wants to ask him. She can’t. Then she does. “You… shared. Those girls. In the motel.”

He’s looking at the wall over her head.

“That girl,” she says. “The red-haired girl. Do you share her?”

He shifts in his seat, drinks. “No.”

“Sam, you don’t like girls.”

He’s very still now. Quietly he says, “What do you mean?”

“You don’t like girls. You’re gay.”

“I’m not gay. ”

“Yes,” Elisa says, “you are. You came out. A few years after he died. You have a boyfriend. I think. You don’t tell me everything.”

The silence is much longer this time. She is in mourning now, mourning for the Sam she knows. Her friend, her only son.

His shoulders are hitching and his feet scrape against the floor. As if he’s bound to the chair and is trying to get free. His empty glass falls from his hand onto the carpet.

“Sam?”

There are tears in his voice as he says, “I’m cooking the books!”

She waits.

“Silas is — we tried to start our own company. His games don’t sell. You know — they’re supposed to be arty. People hate him here… it’s a fuckin’… it’s a miracle we’re not fired.”

He draws a deep breath and his throat sounds a low and wandering note, a wheeze. When he speaks again, he has reined in his emotions.

“Silas is… he doesn’t like working for somebody else. I mean, I can’t blame him. He wanted to go independent. He found a partner, we were going to go in together on this space in La Puente… so we started… skimming off the top. I mean, Silas felt like — we both did — like we deserved it. They really are assholes, these people. But the guy, the partner… he fuckin’ disappeared. We got robbed. It was so fuckin’ stupid…”

They sit there in the darkening room, facing each other, Elisa on the bed and Sam on the chair. She reaches out and takes his thick pale hands in hers.

“Just come home,” she says. “Leave it all behind.”

He snorts. “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

“I mean it.”

“I can’t just leave. I’m the accountant. It was all his idea but I’m the one. I could go to jail. I gotta try to make it right. We’re living off of beans and rice.”

“How much have you taken, Sam?”

He shakes his hung head.

“Your father and I… we could help you out. If you just quit now. Quit now and come home.”

The shaking of his head, his shaggy head, slows and then stops. She has gazed at it, the whorls of fine hair, the hot slick skin, always a little oily, so many times in her life, every time she held him, comforted him. Whenever he was sick, whenever Silas hurt him. She wants to lean forward and kiss it, but holds back.

He says, “I still don’t understand why you’re here.”

“You’re my son. I love you.”

“The things you said…”

“I don’t remember!”

He withdraws his hands from hers, sits up straight, glares at her with his wet hard eyes. “That you couldn’t help me. I was beyond help. I was weak to follow him. That I was ruining your life.”

“No.”

“That’s what you said. You said I needed to break away. You’d be there if I decided to break away.”

“That’s what I’m saying now!” she cries.

“But you knew I wouldn’t.”