Adam Haslett - You Are Not a Stranger Here

“It’ll be all right, I guess.”

“Well, I think it’s quite something.” She turned to admire him.

“Aren’t you going sailing?”

“Mr. West said he’d had it for the day.”

“No, Penelope’s taking the boat out, she and Trevor are going. You could probably tag along if you wanted.”

He felt a tingling in his hands, the air suddenly live with current. He’d tried to forget his dream as his father had told him to. But he felt sick to his stomach with the memory of it now, and it didn’t matter what his father thought.

“You can’t let them,” he said, nearly whispering.

“What are you talking about?”

“Mum. You have to listen. Trevor, he’s going to die out there.

You can’t let them.”

His mother leaned sharply forward, the muscles of her jaw tightening. “How dare you say that,” she said. “How dare you say your own brother is going to die. You should be ashamed! What’s the matter with you?”

“I know about cousin William, Mum—Trev told me—and you can believe whatever you want about Mr. Jevins, but I knew, I fucking knew—”

“Samuel!”

“—and yesterday in the car, I dreamt, I did, I dreamt he was dead and there was a sailboat, and I heard him yell. God, Mum, why won’t you believe me!”

His words seemed to push her back into her chair.

“You dreamt it?” she asked, her tone suddenly flat.

“What’s going on here?” Samuel heard his father ask. He turned to see him standing on the deck behind them. “What’s that you just said to your mother?”

“Roger—”

“No, Elizabeth. I will not indulge this. This family is not going to be turned into a madhouse because of some bloody coincidence that happened ten years ago. It’s ridiculous.

And you, Sam. I thought I’d made myself clear.”

His father grabbed him by the arm and pulled him through the kitchen, past Peter, who looked up in surprise from his plate of biscuits, and past Mrs. West in the hall, down the stairs to the boys’ room. He sat Samuel down on the bed.

“Now you’re going to spend the rest of the day in here, you understand? And you have a good long think about what you’ve just done—scaring your own mother.” His voice was so laden with derision, Samuel thought he might spit on him.

But he turned instead and walked out of the room, slamming the door behind him.

Minutes passed. Samuel heard splashing; Penelope called something up to her parents; water sloshed under the dock.

He felt as though his mind’s eye were being dragged through the wall to watch his brother step onto the boat. A dead, rattling sound filled the air of the room. He couldn’t bear it. He hurried to the window, cranked it open as far as it would go, and started yelling, he barely knew what, words coming too quickly, in a jumble. “Stay!” They had to stay here. “Trevor!”

In a moment the door opened behind him, and then his father had him up against one of the bunk beds. He slapped Samuel hard across the face, bouncing his head off the wood of the bed frame. Then he slapped him again, yelling words Samuel couldn’t make out. When his shouting stopped, he turned and left the room.

Later, a few minutes perhaps, a key turned in the knob, locking the door from the outside.

Samuel’s body was numb. He sat cross-legged on the floor, holding his head in his hands, the rattling sound still there in his ears. He saw spots darkening brown on his khaki shorts and realized tears were dripping from his cheeks. He wiped them away and stared at the knitted rows of blue carpet dissolving into infinite pattern. He heard rope chafing on the cleats of the Sunfish, the halyard snapping against the mast.

He felt very tired, as if he’d been running through the woods at school for hours and hours, all the coming pain of his brother’s death arriving in a wave too strong to survive awake. Trevor. Who had been with him in those spare hours in the house, whose room and company he longed for. His brother who had never made friends of his own, who seemed forever lonely.

It will drive them crazy, he thought, this pain. What Samuel had said, what he knew. There was nowhere for it to go. It would lay his parents’ world to ruin. He’d live with his mother somewhere; his father wouldn’t be able to bear him. He remembered standing in the main hall with Mr. Kinnet, trying to convince himself it wasn’t true about Jevins. He tried with his whole spirit to go back there now, to the place where he could believe it was a stupid dream, that his mind was being squeezed in the fist of some evil pretender. He prayed like they did in chapel, Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses…

The sail flapped in the breeze.

“Ready?” Trevor called.

The window faced east down the strait. Standing by it, Samuel couldn’t see the boat. Or the sun emerging from behind the bank of cloud. Only the rays of light striking the bridge’s red arch, shining on the water.

“Careful now, you two,” he heard his mother call from the deck, the desperation she tried to hide within the rise of her voice not hidden from Samuel.

Then no more sounds. He turned from the window heavy lidded, his body lowering itself down onto the bed. He laid his head on the pillow and sleep dragged him under.

SAMUEL WOKE TO the feeling of a hand against his cheek.

His mother was sitting by him on the edge of the bed.

“You should come up for supper,” she said. “There’s kedgeree and I saved you some lemonade.”

He clutched her arm.

“They’re fine, Sam, they’re fine. They were only gone a little while, they’re up there now finishing their dinner. Everything’s fine.” She ran her hand through his damp hair, a frail look of relief still hovering in the creases of her face.

“He was too hard today, your father, he wasn’t fair.” Her fingers rubbed his scalp. She looked as though she might cry, but she didn’t.

“There are things you don’t know, Sam, things that make it hard for him.” She paused and looked down at the floor.

Samuel held his mother’s hand, muscles he never knew he had letting go with relief. To be here, his mother’s pulse against his fingers, her face above him, the most familiar thing in the world, listening to her voice, knowing Trevor was upstairs, the house safely around them. He needed nothing more.

“This business your brother told you about—your father’s dream… Well, it’s true he had that dream. And that they didn’t call until the next day, but there’s a good reason for that. He’d seen William just the week before down at the hospital in Southampton, and they knew he wasn’t doing well so it makes sense he would have a dream about it, because of his health, his cousin’s health.”

She glanced up at Samuel and then away again, out the window. “Your father gets upset when he hears you talking about knowing these things, or dreaming; he gets worried, because he loves you and he doesn’t want you to get confused. It’s important you don’t get confused. There are coincidences, but it doesn’t mean the world doesn’t make sense. You can understand that, can’t you?”

Samuel sat up and hugged his mother.

“Darling,” she said, “if you’re having nightmares, if they’re bad, we can find someone, someone you can talk with.” He closed his eyes and pressed his face against her shoulder.

Upstairs, Peter and Penelope and Trevor all looked at him with a strange curiosity, as if he’d just returned from hospital and they were wondering if he was better. He had after all, he thought to himself, yelled some pretty weird stuff out the window for no reason they could tell. Their caution lasted only briefly. He sat at the table eating his kedgeree and drinking his lemonade. Penelope and Trevor seemed to be getting along a bit now. They played a game of racing demon on the table beside him as he ate his cake.