Robert Lennon - Familiar

Derek in the doorway, smiling. Elisa closes her eyes, gropes for the calm, the steel. Her mind conjures a memory, not a specific one but a palimpsest of nearly identical experiences: hauling herself up out of the lake she and her parents used to go to in the summer, somewhere in Michigan: an aluminum ladder, bolted to the dock, the rank water sluicing off her body and out of her swimsuit, and Elisa at last standing steady on the bare wood in her bare feet — goggles on her head, the rubber strap tugging at her wet hair — gazing out over the choppy surface roiled by a coming storm. Up and out of the lake, under her own power, looking back at what she has emerged from: that’s the image that will give her strength. She draws, lets out, breath, takes up her purse and conference binder and holds them in her lap.

Then, with deep reluctance, she gets out. She makes her way up the walk and Derek comes out to meet her. He’s wearing jeans, a clean white tee shirt, bare feet. He seems to be approaching too fast, and she flinches — but he only pauses to kiss her cheek, squeeze her elbow, and then he is past.

She watches him pop open the trunk of the car and pull from it a small suitcase, hers apparently. Which he knew would be there. She turns, climbs the front step, enters the house.

It’s tidy. There’s a new carpet. For years they talked about tearing up the old carpet, refinishing the pine floor, but here they have gone and gotten new carpet instead. A chair has been reupholstered. There are different things on the walls. She is startled by the sight of a studio portrait of the four of them, from when the boys were five and six, that she took down soon after Silas died. And here Derek has put it back.

“The chicken’s almost done,” Derek says from the doorway. “You want a glass of wine?”

“Please.” And he nods and disappears.

She goes to the bedroom. It’s similar, aside from a new comforter and, again, the carpet. She slips her shoes off, then the stockings, then she sits on the bed for several minutes, taking deep breaths. She says “Okay” and goes down to the kitchen. A glass is waiting for her on the table. It’s the same table. But the cabinets are new, the linoleum is gone and replaced by synthetic hardwood, the refrigerator and stove are new. The glass is full of white wine. She doesn’t drink white wine, but she drinks it now. Derek is busying himself in front of the stove, sawing away at a roasted chicken in a pan. He turns, smiles again, comes to her and takes her face in his hands. They kiss.

“I missed you,” says her husband.

She is impressed with herself, at her ability to pretend. She lets him do the talking. He talks about a man in his department; she’s supposed to know who this is. He talks about world events. He looks good — if she has let herself go here, Derek has become more disciplined. He’s leaner, his skin has some color. She suspects that he has gotten a gym membership — it’s something he used to talk about doing but in the old life never did.

“The old life.” It’s only been a few hours. Look how she’s adjusting! Derek is cheerful, cheerful, cheerful. The food is good, no wonder she’s overweight. The same magnets are on the refrigerator and she is wondering how to tell him what has happened to her.

She gets up to load the dishwasher and he laughs at her. Come on, he says, and motions her into the living room, their wine glasses in his hand, bottle in the other. She expects a crisis — something — a confession — a discussion. Instead they sit down and he keeps talking, and she realizes that he wants to fuck her.

So this is something they do, in this life. She remembers it now, this mood, the barely suppressed laughter, the ridiculousness of their desire. Here, in this life, it has returned. It isn’t that sex between them has ended in the other life, it’s just that it isn’t very funny, or very fun. It’s more like a reminder to them that they are married. It’s pleasurable and necessary and serious.

They’re on the sofa and he’s flirting with her. He’s stroking her shoulder and her arms and she finds herself saying “Well!” She’s playing along, but of course it’s easy, this is her, this is Derek, even if it isn’t her, it isn’t Derek. This Derek is certainly attractive to her, she’ll give him that. She feels bad about the extra weight. But then doesn’t, not really, as he kisses her, unbuttons her blouse, takes her breasts into his hands. All of her feels a little more… luxurious. She thinks of Larry, her lover, the man from the frame shop, and she feels guilty — not as if she’s betrayed Derek, but as if she’s betraying Larry now. She doesn’t feel that way when she has sex with Derek in the other life. She wonders if this Elisa is sleeping with the Larry of this life. Everything is becoming confused in her mind, the Elisas and Dereks and Larrys, but this Elisa is turned on by this Derek. His hand is under her skirt. They’re undressing. They’re making little sounds.

Suddenly Derek stands up, his shirt off, his pants unbuttoned, and holds out his hand. It’s time to go to the bedroom. She follows him, letting her skirt fall onto the carpeted floor. It’s quiet — the carpet makes everything quiet. Suddenly she likes the idea of carpet very much. She climbs the stairs, passing the photo of the boys as toddlers, then moves down the hallway, watching the muscles in Derek’s back.

Something catches her eye then, something she saw without seeing when she came up here to take off her shoes, and her mind tells her, Don’t look, just follow him down the hall. But she slows, looks, stops. There’s another photo of the boys here, with Derek this time, and something is the matter with it. The photo has been taken someplace she doesn’t immediately recognize, someplace outdoors. Hills and water in the background. They are all wearing windbreakers. Derek is the only one smiling, but you can tell it isn’t genuine, he is under strain, setting a good example. He is looking not at the camera but at the photographer, presumably Elisa but she doesn’t, still doesn’t, remember this. Sam is pale, drawn; he looks like this is his first time outdoors in a while. His face is riddled with acne and his hair arcs over his head in a cowlick. His most awkward time, when most boys had begun to look like men. Eighteen? He must be eighteen or nineteen. But that doesn’t seem right. Why not?

It’s Silas, though, whom she is staring at now, Silas who is the problem. He’s looking at the camera, directly at the camera, as if he is thinking as he does it that it’s the future he’s looking at, future versions of his brother, his parents, himself, people he doesn’t know yet, people who might not even be born. In his eyes is the expression of calm calculation she remembers, of a sneakiness so subtle that he could not be accused of harboring it, not without the accuser looking like a paranoid, a fool. He’s smirking, that at least is how she reads this expression. She can’t remember where this was, she can’t remember, and it is suddenly very important to her that she remember, and she reaches out a hand to steady herself against the wall as she tells herself to remember, remember, you have to remember.

“Lisa?”

Derek, I want to come down the hall, I want to make love in this strange body, to your strange body, but I have to remember now, I have to remember this impossible thing or I am going to scream, because Silas didn’t live to seventeen, or even sixteen, he was dead two months after his fifteenth birthday, and this photograph cannot exist. And so I need to be wrong now, before we go to bed, I need to remember this moment.

But it’s hopeless, because the moment never happened, not anywhere in her memory. And so she doesn’t go to Derek, doesn’t go to the bedroom, instead she stumbles into the bathroom, collapses onto the toilet seat, and bunches a bath towel into her hands and covers her face with it and screams and screams.