You Are Not a Stranger Here - Adam Haslett [50]
“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