Robert Lennon - Familiar

When Derek knocks and enters she is still holding the towel in her hands. It’s unclear how long she’s been sitting here. She doesn’t look up because she doesn’t want to see him.

“Lisa?”

He’s kneeling in front of her now, inserting his head into her line of sight. He says, “Tell me what’s wrong.”

“I’m confused,” she says.

“Okay.”

“I think I had a stroke.”

His forehead creases and she can tell that he is more doubtful than concerned. She can’t blame him. He opens his mouth but most of a second passes before he says, “Do you want to go to the hospital?”

The hospital, at this moment, sounds wonderful to her. Clean and sensible. She nods. He nods. He extracts the bunched-up towel, drops it on the floor, helps her to her feet. A few minutes later she has somehow gotten her clothes back on and so has Derek and they’re in his truck, on their way to the opposite side of town. It’s a long drive. This is the wrong side of town to have had a stroke on, she thinks. Downtown traffic is backed up because of a passing freight train. People are honking for no reason. Someone up ahead has a stereo cranked and the bass makes her feel nauseated. She shuts her eyes. The coins in the ashtray buzz: she thinks of Brownian motion, atoms vibrating too fast to see. Everything around her is vibrating. Her forehead is pressed against the passenger side window and Derek is holding her hand.

“Is anything tingling? Is anything numb?”

“I don’t think so.”

There is irritation in his silence. Surely she should know if she is tingling or numb.

She says, “I’m confused.”

“About what?”

“I don’t remember things.”

“What don’t you remember?”

She doesn’t answer. She wants to tell him everything. Traffic begins to move again.

They wait in the emergency room while Derek fills out forms. It’s strangely silent, among the ferns and rows of airport chairs, though the room is filled with people. There’s no music, shouldn’t there be music? Elisa uses one hand to massage the other. Her breathing is shallow; her body feels insubstantial. Somehow the act of coming here — the act of agreeing to come here — has lightened her. She is no less terrified, but the terror is like the wings of some small bird, beating ineffectually against her. Where is her steely resolve? The image of the lake, of pulling herself up out of the lake, is of no use; she thinks of it and she can feel the dock swaying and lurching under her feet, and the boards are slimed with algae.

They are called in to the examination area and led to one of a dozen rooms surrounding an open central zone of cubicles and workstations. It’s more like an office than it should be. She is given a thin gown and asked to undress and sit on a small bed. Then they wait again. Eventually a doctor introduces himself, Dr. Mayles. He’s bespectacled, nerdy, and friendly. The word socialized springs to mind. It’s the learned friendliness of a man who is not naturally friendly. He is around the same age as Elisa and Derek, and she suddenly imagines the three of them in a play group at the age of four — it’s as if they all grew up together, making their slow way toward this moment, this little tableau. She almost laughs.

Dr. Mayles asks about her medical history, though Derek has already written it on the clipboard the doctor now holds. He shines a penlight in her eyes, holds her chin gently and studies her face. He takes her pulse and blood pressure, taps her knee with a tiny hammer, all the while talking slowly, quietly, asking her questions. What year is it? What’s five times seven? Who’s the president?

2012. Thirty-five. Obama.

She tenses. What if the president’s somebody else? But it seems to be the right answer.

“You have two sons,” the doctor says, reading from the clipboard. “What are their names?”

And as she says the names she realizes that she doesn’t want to be here, doesn’t want to have had a stroke, has made a terrible mistake. She says, “I’m sorry.”

“Why are you sorry?” the doctor asks.

“I’m fine. I think I’m fine actually.”

Derek is standing beside the bed, both hands gripping the side rail. He is studying her. “You said you couldn’t remember things,” he says.

“What can’t you remember, Elisa?” says the doctor.

The fluttering wings again. She feels her heartbeat growing faster and weaker. “My… job. I was on a trip — I didn’t know what it was for. I don’t… I saw a photo in my house. Of our sons. And I couldn’t remember where it was taken. It was unfamiliar.”

The doctor seems to have adopted Derek’s reckoning gaze. It’s contagious. He says, “When was the last time you had a CT scan?”

“Never?” she says.

“Okay. Let’s make sure everything looks normal up there.” Meaning, presumably, her head. “The nurse will take some blood. And then we’ll get you down to radiology.” He sounds disappointed. A look passes between him and Derek. But then Derek turns back to her and there’s nothing on his face but sympathy and worry. He takes her hand again.

“Your job? What about it don’t you remember?”

She squeezes her eyes shut.

As promised, a nurse arrives and draws blood from her arm. She doesn’t look. Later she’s asked to sit in a wheelchair and is taken to the room where they keep the CT scanner. It looks like a giant toilet seat. Derek is asked to remain outside. She lies down on a table and a nurse, a different one, injects a dye into her arm, not far from where the blood was taken out. They are replacing my blood with dye, she thinks. A technician instructs her to remain still, the room clears, and the machine knocks and hums as the table she lies on makes abrupt gradual movements.

This is the most relaxing part of the entire experience. She is alone here with the machine. She isn’t thinking of anything at all. The machine is rocking her gently. She falls asleep.

In the end, there’s nothing. Her brain looks normal. Her blood is normal — she’s maybe a little anemic. The doctor prescribes eating. “And B vitamins. You could maybe pick some of those up at the supermarket.” He tells Derek to keep an eye on her.

“Are you beginning to remember?” he asks her, almost as an afterthought.

She manages a smile. “It’s all coming back to me now.”

It went this way:

He wasn’t driving. The driver lived but ended up paralyzed and in a coma. The boy in the passenger seat was killed, as was Silas, who was in back with a fourth passenger.

The fourth passenger was a boy named Kevin Framus. His injuries were not serious. He was the one who told the police what happened. There was an alley behind the brick factory, on the southern shore of Lake Monona, with a stone retaining wall that ran along one side and a chain-link fence along the other. The alley was long and lightless, and the driver, a twenty-seven-year-old man named Richard Samuelson, liked to drive down it at high speed with the headlights off.

“Did he ever say why he liked this?” the prosecuting attorney asked Kevin Framus, many months later, during Samuelson’s manslaughter trial, which Elisa and Derek watched, over several days, from the hard wooden benches behind the attorney’s table, their backs sweating and aching, their minds exhausted, blank.

“He liked getting rushed up.”

“And this meant what?”

“That’s what he used to say. Like, all excited. For the adrenaline rush. We were going out looking for girls.”

This man Samuelson was a high school dropout. He played the drums in local bands. Silas had learned to play bass and was in one of the bands. The other boys in the van were band members. Samuelson, it emerged, hung around with schoolboys in order to attract underage girls. He and his companions would pair up with the girls and have sex with them in the van. The van was full of candles and incense and drugs. Apparently Samuelson liked to watch the younger boys having sex with their girls, while he was having sex with his.