Excerpt from Imagine Me Gone by Adam Haslett, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

John's friends' houses. That's where we spend all our vacations.

Upstairs, Celia has fallen asleep with her book propped on her chest. She rolls over without opening her eyes when I lift it from her hands. Michael's still sitting up against the headboard reading his novel, his feet wriggling beneath the blanket. It takes him forever to wind down. Alec and Celia have simpler batteries that burn through and fade. But to Michael this is a new bed and a new room, even if he's been here three summers in a row, and all the driving and running in the yard aren't enough to still him. In a few days, out on the island, he'll unclench a bit, getting into a rhythm closer to the other two, but never entirely. He's seen me come in but keeps reading, his teeth biting softly at the inside of his cheek. I run my hand through his thick black hair, which needs a cut—it's coming down over his eyes and ears—and start feeling for ticks. He turns his head away.

"You already did that."

Alec is so easy to touch. He never doesn't want to be touched. Celia's ten now and beginning to notice she lives in a body, so touch is getting more complicated, no more clasping at my leg, more pushing and pulling and long looks. But with Michael it's been fraught from the start. Babies are scrunched little creatures, but then they splay flat on the crib or floor. Except Michael never quite did. Like a little old man, he remained almost always hunch-shouldered and bent at the waist. He slept blessedly well but when he did cry, holding him rarely helped. I didn't understand. That's what a mother was supposed to do, hold her crying child. I thought maybe it was my inexperience, but then Celia came, and then Alec, and picking them up when they cried was like throwing a switch: the wailing ceased. And then I knew the difference. Celia's and Alec's discomforts were creaturely and fluid; they passed through them and were gone. But holding Michael had always been like holding a little person, who knew that his feeding would end, who knew that if you were picked up you would be put down, that the comfort came but also went. Without knowing what it was, I'd felt that tension in his little groping arms and fitful legs, the discomfort of the foreknowledge. Was I more skittish in my touches and kisses because I sensed my ineffectuality? I can't say. With children, everything's already happening and then over with. It happens while you're trying to keep up and gone by the time you arrive at a view of things.

"We're getting up early tomorrow," I tell him. "You should turn out the light."

"But I'm not tired," he says, still without looking up from the page.

I'm sitting beside him on the bed, my arm over his shoulder. That I should notice the position of my body to his at all—that's the difference.

"What are you reading?"

"Thomas Mann. He's German. But it's set in Venice. Have you ever been there?"

"Before I married your father."

"Did it smell?"

"Not particularly. Do you like the book?"

"I only just started. The poet of all those who labor on the brink of exhaustion. That's not bad."

"Is that all you brought?"

"No. I've got the one on machine code." A tiny-print tome he's ordered direct from McGraw-Hill about computers or the numbers in computers. It's Greek to me. But there's another boy at school who's interested and he doesn't make friends like the other two, so I'm all for it.

"Five more minutes, all right?"

"Okay, okay," he says, turning the page, rendering me superfluous.


Downstairs, John has poured himself a glass of Bill Mitchell's Scotch and moved on to the business section. I must make the children's lunches for tomorrow, I think, until I remember there's no school and so no rush.

Excerpted from Imagine Me Gone by Adam Haslett. Copyright © 2016 by Adam Haslett. Excerpted by permission of Little Brown & Company. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.