Robert Lennon - Familiar

“I don’t get it,” he says.

“Whatever you’ve done to him. Made him do. The money you stole. Let him go. Let him come home. Solve your own problems yourself.”

Silas leans back, shaking his head. He holds out his palms. “What did he tell you — I made him do it? Steal?”

She waits.

“For what? My company?” He shakes his head. “No. I got problems, but I have a fucking life. He’s the one with the real problems. Whatever he’s stealing, it went up his nose or in his arm, it didn’t go to me. And I’m risking my career to cover his ass. I would love for him to walk out that door,” Silas says, pointing, leaning toward her across the table. “I’m sick of his shit. I share my house with him, my fucking work, everything, and he just fucks everything up. It’s a good thing the startup fell apart, because he would have just fucked that up, too, right when it started getting good.”

Elisa hesitates. Doubt is creeping in. To look at them, to look at both boys, the state of their rooms, she could believe him. But she doesn’t.

“Your girl,” she says. “Do you share her, too?”

Silas is shaking his head before she has even finished speaking. He throws his arm over the back of the chair. “Wow,” he says. “Wow, that’s awesome. Is that what he’s telling you?

“Look,” he goes on, “None of this is any of your business, Lisa, okay?” He’s angry, his eyes are hard, but there is something strange in his voice, something she doesn’t recognize, that is almost like sympathy. Was it always there? Even in the world she remembers? No, she tells herself, no, this world is different. It couldn’t have been there. “You threw us over,” he is saying. “That was your prerogative. But now it’s mine to tell you to fuck off. If you want to take Sam with you when you do, more power to you. I would love it. Maybe then I wouldn’t lose my job over him. But either do it, and leave me alone, or don’t do it, and leave us both alone. My job is none of your business, my girlfriend is none of your business, the shit on my counter is none of your business. I could have predicted this,” he says, looking tired and old. “That you would change your mind. What about Derek? Him too? Is he on board with this?”

She can’t speak.

“That’s what I thought. No, he makes too much fucking sense for that.”

He stands up, pushes his chair in. She is surprised at how tall he is: he hadn’t finished growing when he died. She wouldn’t have predicted it. Again he gestures with his hand as though there’s a cigarette in it. “You ought to go back to that shrink and have your head examined.” He looks at the ceiling, then back at her. “I can’t believe you did this. Came out here. Incredible.”

“You should move your back door key,” she says, and she is trying to sound defiant, but she just sounds like his mother telling him to put his things away. He is showing her his back, he is walking out of the room. “It took me ten seconds to find it.”

Sitting there, illicitly, in her sons’ kitchen, she is feeling her mind begin to rebel against it all: it would like to shut down now, reject everything, begin work on its own reality, some happy fantasy where it could exist in peace. But she has to resist: she has to consider whether or not Silas might be telling the truth. If perhaps she is wrong, and has always been wrong. About Silas and Sam and everything, in every possible world.

The answer can be found — Derek knows, Amos knows, Sam knows. Here, in this life, all the men have the information, and her role is to extract it, to wheedle it out of them, to beg them for it.

Silas is halfway down the hall now. She says, “Silas, wait!” And to her surprise he does, he stands there with his hand on the wall, close to where she touched it minutes ago. His back is to her. He’s waiting.

“Where did you go? That time you ran away, when you were fifteen.”

His hand drops from the wall and he half-turns toward her. He appears exhausted.

She says, “You remember — your lost weekend. You left school and didn’t come back for days. Where were you? What did you do? We searched and searched.” In her voice is real conviction, as if she actually remembers it, as if it actually happened.

But Silas is shaking his head. “I just wanted to be alone,” he said. “That’s all. I went off to be alone.”

For a second he looks as though he’s finished; he shifts his weight, he shows her his back. But then he turns back to face her. “And I didn’t run away,” he says. “I walked. It was easy. I just walked away and nobody followed me.”

And now, as if in illustration, he does exactly that: walks down the hall, away from her, opens the bedroom door and passes through. The door closes, gently, and then everything is quiet again.

She has one more day here. She has an idea about what to do, but isn’t sure how to go about it. So she lies on her hotel bed, dozes for a short while, tries calling Sam several times. He doesn’t answer.

Around noon she heads for the coffee shop she went to the previous day. There’s a free internet connection — the first fifteen minutes are free, anyway. And her laptop battery is almost dead and she forgot to bring the power supply. But she works fast. Caltech, that’s where Hugo Bonaventure teaches, and it’s nearby. She tries to recall what he told her, the experiment his colleagues performed, and over her coffee finds the name of the man who heads the research team, and his office location. Buses go there: she plots a route. She is aware that it’s Sunday, but scientists are in their labs on Sundays, she certainly remembers that much.

Of course this occurred to her before she left, though until now it hasn’t coalesced into a plan of action. She has heard nothing from Hugo Bonaventure, and her offers to take Betsy out for coffee have gone unanswered. The plausible explanation she has been craving, the one that lies outside herself, has never seemed farther away. And now, in the wake of her conversations with Silas and Sam, she needs it.

This world is aberrant and wrong, and somebody needs to tell her this. Even if she can’t go back. She will live in hell if she has to, if only somebody will please tell her that, yes, it’s hell, and she does not belong here.

The buses are infrequent. She walks a long way to find the right stop, then is too late and she must wait in the heat for the next bus. She makes some transfers. She doesn’t have the right change. She gets off, gets cash, buys some mints and asks for singles. It’s an hour and a half before she reaches the campus, and she is exhausted and hot and feels like finding a tree to lie under and go to sleep. She wishes she’d taken the laptop out of her satchel, left it at the hotel. It’s heavy.

Caltech is small, all of its buildings clustered within a single large city block. The buildings are dull and angular, sandlike, etched with strange patterns. She walks among them as if dazed, finds the one she wants, consults the directory board in the lobby. The air here is cool and almost nobody is around; she stands at the directory for a long time, listening to the sounds of her own breaths. Finally she climbs the stairs and finds the right office.

No one’s there, of course; the door is locked. There is a schedule taped to it that refers to the spring semester already passed. She stands, thinking, for several minutes. Then she hears footsteps and looks up.

It’s a tall young man, heavy and bearded, sweating, in a hurry. He moves past her and keys open a door a few offices down. When she reaches it, he is rummaging through a file cabinet, muttering under his breath.

“Excuse me?”

The boy looks up, startled — perhaps he passed her without even noticing she was there.