Robert Lennon - Familiar

Elisa would have liked to discuss this phenomenon with Derek, but he didn’t believe it to be real. He believed that his mother meant well and harbored no ill will toward Elisa at all.

In any event, and in spite of everything, she thought she would soon be going back to work, and she thought she would like to have a photo of the boys there. They rarely took photographs, they weren’t that kind of family. They owned a small digital camera that now had a year’s worth of pictures on it, on the memory card, that they had never transferred to a computer, or gotten printed. The camera was always lying around somewhere, in the basket of pencils in the kitchen drawer, or on the coffee table, or in somebody’s bag, and every now and then one of them would pick it up and gaze at the photos on the tiny screen.

Elisa was looking for the camera. She couldn’t find it. Sam and Derek didn’t know where it was. She searched for twenty minutes before discovering it, at last, in Lorraine’s room. Later, when Lorraine came home — she had taken Sam and Derek to the movies — and saw the camera in Elisa’s hands, she said, “I see you found the camera.”

“What did you do?”

“I’m sorry, dear,” Lorraine said, “I don’t know what you mean.”

Derek was standing beside his mother, keys still in hand. They were in the kitchen, Derek staring at Elisa, who sat, still gripping the camera, at the table. Where she had been waiting for them. Sam had disappeared. Lorraine was looking at something on the floor, or perhaps just at the floor.

“They’re gone,” Elisa said. “The pictures.”

No one spoke for a moment. Then Derek said, “What do you mean?”

“I’m talking to your mother.”

Now Lorraine looked up, her face scrubbed of emotion. “I don’t think so, dear. I was just looking at them.”

“Not all of them,” Elisa said. “The pictures of Silas. I took one of the boys together. It’s not in here.”

“Well, whatever is on there now, that’s what was on there when I picked it up.” She swept her hand over the countertop, as though wiping away dust, though there was no dust.

Elisa looked at Derek, who was staring at her with curiosity. Elisa held out the camera to him.

He sat at the table and clicked through the photos with his thumb. He said, “I’m not sure anything’s missing.”

“All the pictures of Silas.”

“He hated having his picture taken.” His eyes were still on the screen. “I don’t think there were any.”

“Derek,” she said. “You remember the one where they’re in the booth at that diner. And at the state park. And the one where he’s throwing rocks into the creek.”

“Did he come to the state park with us? Didn’t he stay with what’s-his-name, that fat kid?”

“He came to the park. You took his picture. I took his picture.”

“Well,” he said, and handed the camera back. “Maybe something happened to them. Some digital thing.”

This, of course, was asinine. Derek wasn’t an idiot. He was a lawyer, an academic. He was the most organized person she had ever met. (Later, it would be his uncharacteristic unconcern that would tell her their marriage was falling apart: his unwillingness to solve their problems, any problems, however insignificant.) He did not believe that “some digital thing” had happened — and even if he did, he would know which digital thing he was referring to. This was an act he was putting on for his mother. To signal his sympathy for her position, her reason for deleting the photos, whatever it might have been.

“Things are always malfunctioning,” Lorraine said from across the room. Her back was turned, and she was making tea at the counter.

Now Elisa stared at the floor. The room was silent. She wasn’t going to raise her head to look at him, not just yet. There would be an apology in his eyes. Indulge me. She didn’t want to give him the satisfaction.

But so what? There was nothing here to satisfy anyone, even Lorraine. There were no points for anyone to score. Later that night she would feel this even more powerfully, as she imagined the conditions under which Lorraine would have deleted the photos: alone in the study, knowing her dead grandson was there, on the memory card, a poison pill. Maybe she was drinking. What did Elisa know? Lorraine picked up the camera in a fit of anger and grief, and deleted them. The seeds of misery, obliterated. It wasn’t about Elisa at all. It was what Lorraine’s body had done to quell the sadness she did not otherwise know how to express.

The photos were still on there, of course. Elisa herself understood how it worked, the subterfuge of digital storage. The data wasn’t overwritten, it remained in place, there on the memory card. All that was removed was the camera’s willingness to acknowledge it. Where the camera once saw the photos, it now saw holes: neat blank spaces, like graves.

Flawlessly implemented denial: this is what pressing the DELETE key accomplished, on the family camera. There were places in town where Elisa could take the card to have the data recovered, to have the photos exhumed. But, with much the same variety of inertia that would later prevent them from moving Silas’s real grave to Reevesport, she held back. Something had been done, and that was that. A part of Elisa had moved on. She did not want to go back. Indeed, she was grateful, in a way, to Lorraine for eliminating the temptation to look, to prolong her agony. Or she would be grateful, lying in bed that night, once she had more time to think it over.

But not yet. Now, in the kitchen, Elisa gave in: she looked up at her husband. But he wasn’t looking at her. He was watching his mother with apparent love and concern, and never did turn to face his wife.

The trouble with driving is that there is nothing for the body to do. The mind sees the body moving; the landscape is rushing by outside. It believes that the body must be occupied. But the body is motionless, and the mind does not accept the experience as real.

Several hours of this state lay ahead of her: she should use them to prepare.

But how can you prepare for the unknown? For the impossible? She wants to know what to do, how to behave, but there are no precedents in her life, or any other life she has heard of, to follow. She can only think of movies. A spy picture: the agent going undercover, pretending to be somebody else, ferreting out secrets. Of course there’s always a moment when the spy’s cover is blown and he blasts his way out of the alternate life. Or he gets the information he needs and his mission ends. He returns home. He resumes his real life.

Elisa is, in fact, returning home right now. Home is the mission. This is real life.

Or it’s science fiction. Someone was doing an experiment, and the fabric of space and time was torn. She is the unwitting victim of a top-secret military project, code-named Omega or Vanguard. Somewhere an angry man in a uniform is shouting, demanding to know what went wrong. In her quest to discover the truth, she’ll go all the way to the top. And meanwhile the president picks up a red phone and, jaw tight, says Get… me… that… woman.

Or it’s a psychological thriller. The heroine has amnesia. That’s a real phenomenon, not just a movie trope; it happens to regular people. You forget who you are and what you’re doing, and your past disappears. The people you love, the house you live in, they’re familiar to you. But you’re lost in your own life.

Of course, her past has not disappeared. With effort, she could tell you where she was during any week of her adult life. She remembers every moment that led up to this thing, this state of being, whatever it is. But maybe this past life she believes is hers, is part of the amnesia — a kind of dream she was having. This is her real life, the one where she was at the conference. And the other one, the one where she was skinny and wearing cutoffs and driving her old Honda, that one was imaginary.