Adam Haslett - You Are Not a Stranger Here

From the front room, he heard a small sound—a moan let out in little breaths—and realized it was the sound of his sister crying. He had ruined her life. He knew that now in a way he’d always tried not to know it—with certainty. For years he’d allowed himself to imagine she had forgotten Ben, or at least stopped remembering. He stood up from the table and crossed the room but stopped at the entrance to the hall. What consolation could he give her now?

Standing there, listening to her tears, he remembered the last time he’d heard them, so long ago it seemed like the memory of a former life: a summer morning when she’d returned from university, and they’d walked together over the fields in a brilliant sunshine and come to the oak trees, their green leaves shining, their branches heavy with acorns.

She’d wept then for the first time in all the years since their mother had taken herself away. And Owen had been there to comfort her—his turn at last, after all she had done to protect him. At the sound of his footsteps entering the hall, Hillary went quiet. He stopped again by the door to the front room.

Sitting at the breakfast table, reading those letters from America, it wasn’t only Ben’s affection he’d envied. Being replaced. That was the fear. The one he’d been too weak to master.

Holding on to the banister, he slowly climbed the stairs, his feet pressing against the worn patches of the carpet. They might live in this silence the rest of their lives, he thought. In his room, he walked to the window and looked again over the common.

When they were little they’d gone to the village on Sundays to hear the minister talk. Of charity and sacrifice. A Norman church with hollows worked into the stones of the floor by centuries of parishioners. He could still hear the congregation singing, Bring me my bow of burning gold! Bring me my arrows of desire! Their mother had sung with them. Plaintive voices rising. And did those feet in ancient time walk upon England’s mountains green? Owen could remember wanting to believe something about it all, if not the words of the Book perhaps the sorrow he heard in the music, the longing of people’s song. He hadn’t been in a church since his mother’s funeral. Over the years, views from the train or the sight of this common in evening had become his religion, absorbing the impulse to imagine larger things.

Looking over it now, he wondered at the neutrality of the grass and the trees and the houses beyond, how in their stillness they neither judged nor forgave. He stared across the playing field a moment longer. And then, calmly, he crossed to the wardrobe and took down the box.

SITTING IN THE front room, Hillary heard her brother’s footsteps overhead and then the sound of his door closing.

Her tears had dried and she felt a stony kind of calm, gazing into the wing chair opposite—an old piece of their parents’ furniture. Threads showed at the armrests, and along the front edge the ticking had come loose. At first they’d meant to get rid of so many things, the faded rugs, the heavy felt curtains, but their parents’ possessions had settled in the house, and then there seemed no point.

In the supermarket checkout line, she sometimes glanced at the cover of a decor magazine, a sunny room with blond wood floors, bright solid colors, a white sheet on a white bed. The longing for it usually lasted only a moment. She knew she’d be a foreigner in such a room.

She sipped the last of her wine and put the glass down on the coffee table. Darkness had fallen now and in the window she saw the reflection of the lamp and the mantel and the bookcase.

“Funny, isn’t it? How it happens.” That’s all her friend Miriam Franks would ever say if the conversation turned onto the topic of why neither of them had married. Hillary would nod and recall one of the evenings she’d spent with Ben up at the cottage, sitting in the garden, talking of Owen, thinking to herself she could only ever be with someone who understood her brother as well as Ben did.

She switched off the light in the front room and walked to the kitchen. Owen had wiped down the counters, set everything back in its place. For a moment, she thought she might cry again. Her brother had led such a cramped life, losing his friends, scared of what people might know. She’d loved him so fiercely all these years, the fears and hindrances had felt like her own. What good, then, had her love been? she wondered as she pulled the French doors shut. Upstairs, Owen’s light was still on, but she didn’t knock or say good night as she usually did. Across the hall in her own room, she closed the door behind her. The little stack of letters lay on her bed. Years ago she had read them, after rummaging for a box at Christmastime. Ben was married by then, as she’d found out when she called. Her anger had lasted a season or two but she had held her tongue, remembering the chances Owen had to leave her and how he never had.

Standing over the bed now, looking down at the pale blue envelopes, she was glad her brother had let go of them at last. Tomorrow they would have supper in the kitchen. He would offer to leave this house, and she would tell him that was the last thing she wanted.

Putting the letters aside, she undressed. When she’d climbed into bed, she reached up and turned the switch of her bedside lamp. For an instant, lying in the sudden darkness, she felt herself there again in the woods, covering her brother’s eyes as she gazed up into the giant oak.

HE HAS SEEN these cliffs before, in picture books. He has seen the wide beaches and the ruined cathedral. Ellen, his wife, she has shown him. In the taxi from the station, Paul looks over the golf course, and there is Saint Andrews: the bell tower, rows of huddled stone houses, the town set out on a promontory, out over the blue-black sea. Farther, in the distance, a low bank of rain cloud stretches over the water waves emerge from the mist. He follows them into shore, watching them swel and crest, churning against the rocks.

Ellen reaches across the back seat and takes his hand.

They have come here for her to use a library at the university.

They have paid for their trip with the last of her grant money and a credit card. Paul’s latest psychiatrist, the one they can’t really afford, has said a change of scenery might help, a break in the routine of empty days. He’s been gone from work a year now, low as he’s ever been and tired. In their apartment, in a college town in Pennsylvania, he has lain in bed in the early morning hours as Ellen slept beside him, and known that her life would be easier if he were gone.

He’s been too fatigued to plan.

Until now.

Staring at the dark face of the cliffs, his mind quickens enough to see how it might happen, and for a moment, sitting there in the taxi, holding his wife’s hand, he feels relief.

AFTER CHECKING INTO the hotel and unpacking their

things, they go looking for a restaurant. The main street is cobbled, lined with two-story stone buildings, dirty beige or gray. A drizzle has begun to fall, dotting the plate glass windows of the shops closed for the night. The pubs have stopped serving food. They wander further and come to a restaurant on the town square, a mock American diner lit with traffic signals, the walls hung with road signs for San Diego and Gary, Indiana.

“Charming,” Ellen says, opening the front door.

Paul hangs back, stilled by a dread of the immediate future, the dispiriting imitations he sees through the windows, a fear of what it will feel like to be in there, a sense that commitment to it could be a mistake, that perhaps they should keep going. Though he doesn’t want that either, having already sensed an abandoned quality to this town: the students gone for their Easter break, the pubs nearly empty, the dirty right angle where the sidewalk meets the foundation stones of a darkened bank, the crumpled flyer that lies there, all of it gaining on him now, this scene, these objects, their malignancy. He tries to recall the relief of just an hour ago: that soon this will end, the accusatory glare of the inanimate world. But there on the pavement in halogen streetlight is a scattering of sand that appears to him as if in the tight focus of a camera’s lens, sharper than his eyes can bear. He takes a steadying breath, as the doctor told him to when the world of objects becomes so lucid he feels he is being crushed by their presence.