Adam Haslett - You Are Not a Stranger Here

He’d got his learner’s permit and three mornings a week he had driving lessons. The rest of his time he spent in his room at the computer, programming in some machine code, the screen covered in lines of numbers and symbols.

Newsletters from American software companies and product literature covered his desk and floor. Samuel watched his brother work, or just hung out in his room and read or played on the game station.

It didn’t matter that Trevor only half listened to him or that when he did listen he often made fun of him. His brother being there, the sound of his voice, it was enough. The distance from things he’d kept experiencing during the year, that odd retreat from the physical world, it diminished with Trevor around. Lying on the floor beneath his brother’s window, staring up at the sky on those summer afternoons, listening to Trevor’s fingers on the keyboard, Samuel understood with a secret embarrassment that he loved his brother. One afternoon, their mother banned Trevor from the computer for three hours and told them both to go outside.

Under a tree in the orchard, Samuel sat cross-legged while Trevor lay closer to the trunk in deeper shade, his eyes closed, trying, as he’d told Samuel, to retain in his mind the next line of his program.

Samuel watched huge clouds float on the horizon, taller than churches, vacant palaces in the sky.

“Trev?” he said. “You know that teacher of mine that died last year?”

“Hmmm.” An American baseball cap shaded his brother’s face; he wore trousers and long sleeves, determined that if he had to be outside he would at least prevent himself from getting a tan.

“When he died?” Samuel said. “I knew. Right when it happened.”

“Huh-uh.”

“But it was before anyone else. We hadn’t been told. The school didn’t even know. Not till the next day.”

“Hmmm,” Trevor said. “Maybe you dreamt it. Like Dad and that cousin of his.”

“I wasn’t dreaming, Trev, I was playing football… What about Dad’s cousin?”

Trevor pulled tufts of grass from the orchard floor and threw them down over his feet. “We were on holiday up at the Morlands’. You were still a diaper-ridden little rodent, shitting huge volumes of refuse.”

“Come on, Trevor.”

“Don’t deny it. Anyway, it was when those fat Morlands used to give us that bit at the back with the door between where we slept and Mum and Dad’s room. Dad had this dream his cousin William had died. I woke up and he was sitting at the edge of the bed, speaking with this funny little quiet voice, saying it was sad William died, going on about how the two of them used to play in the back of Granddad’s rope factory.

Creepy, really. Then he got up and went back in the other room. Mum tried telling me the phone call had come the day before, that they just hadn’t told me yet, but I knew he hadn’t been on the phone, and I saw him talking on the cordless the next morning out in the garden before breakfast, looking all worried.

“Anyway, we left so they could go to the funeral. I’m probably not supposed to tell you. They give you flack about your whatsit with that teacher last year?”

“Dad swallowed.”

“Typical. He needs to develop a new subroutine for anger, that one’s dated.”

“We’re going back to the Wests’ for holiday, aren’t we?”

“Yes. Again. Same thing three summers running. Oh, but you like boats, Trevor, and don’t tell me you and Peter don’t have enormous fun, because you do,” Trevor said, imitating their mother’s matter-of-fact reporting of their inner lives.

“Peter West is a rugby-crazed Nazi. He should be taken out and shot.”

Samuel waited but Trevor said nothing about Penelope, the sister. Last time they’d gone up, it seemed like Trevor disliked her the way he did with girls he liked.

Samuel himself hated going to Wales. He had to sleep in what seemed more like the cabin of a ship than a bedroom, under a duvet that smelled of seaweed. The Wests’ kids were both around Trevor’s age; they treated Samuel like a neighbor’s dog their parents had sworn them to mind.

“Why do you think Mum and Dad tried hiding it from you like that?” Samuel asked.

“Dad having dreamt it first, you mean?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know, Sam.” Patches of bare earth were left where he’d torn up the roots of the grass. “Who knows?” He looked up with a crazed smile. “Maybe you should try bending spoons. I bet you’d get on TV for that.” He chuckled, rolling his head back onto the grass. Samuel grabbed his foot and started pulling him across the ground. He kicked back and shouted that Samuel was nothing but a child and then Samuel let go and they wandered into the barn looking about for something to do.

A FEW DAYS later, sitting in the car on the motorway north, Samuel studied the back of his father’s head, his shoulder, the thick branch of his upper arm, the dark-haired forearm, his hand gripping the knob of the gearshift. The tired look on his face when he came through the back door from work, the distracted way he ate his dinner, the blur of weekend afternoons when he napped on the front hall couch, all this disappeared when he got behind the wheel of the car.

He spoke more, seemed alive in a different way. Samuel thought of this as his father’s real self that for some reason only appeared in between places. Whenever he got picked up from school at the end of a term and they reached the head of the valley—just the two of them—his father would press the car up to ninety miles an hour on the straight country lane and then cut the engine as they swooped onto the downhill. They’d plummet faster and faster, fields whizzing by, the car freewheeling, slowly losing speed as they glided along the valley floor, until eventually they crept at fifteen, ten, five miles an hour, engine still off, seeing how far they could get on initial speed plus gravity: to the Southers’ farm or the pub or one time all the way to the foot of the humpback bridge. In the car his father seemed like a magician, in control of everything. Not a man in the middle of the night speaking in a quiet voice of dreams. They arrived at the Wests’ as darkness fell and ate their dinner on their laps in the living room. The house was modern, built onto a cliff on the isle of Anglesey just across the Menai Strait from north Wales. A summer home made for boating, a dock down below. One wall of the living room was glass and through it you could see the lights of houses on the far shore and the lights of a yacht traveling back against the channel’s current, returning from a day at sea.

PETER TOOK TREVOR and Samuel out in the canoe the next morning. He was a year younger than Trevor, co-captain of his rugby team. He had a helmet of thick blond hair, a wide neck, and he didn’t wear any socks with his trainers.

“Faster!” he called over his shoulder as Trevor and Samuel paddled furiously on the right side of the canoe, their two strokes trying to balance the force of Peter’s one to keep the boat on course for the beach out where the strait opened onto the sea. The three of them were racing ahead of Penelope and the adults, who followed behind in a rowboat and a little Sunfish, laden with provisions for lunch and umbrellas for the sun.

Each time Trevor leaned forward to pull his paddle through the water, Samuel could see the muscles in his brother’s neck straining. He was thin and had never been particularly strong.

“Move it along, you two,” Peter yelled, and Trevor’s face went red with exertion.

When the others arrived, towels were handed out and the volleyball net set up. Penelope lay in the sun reading a book.

She was two years older than her brother and quieter. The only sport she ever spoke of was sailing, which she did with her father. While the rest of them played volleyball, Trevor and Samuel sat next to her, under the shade of a nearby umbrella, Trevor in his long sleeves.