Lineage (25 page)

Lance chuckled as a woman in a uniform that matched their host’s approached with their drinks.

“So I heard you had a raging party last night,” Mary said after the waitress had disappeared.

Lance frowned and then laughed after sipping his wine. “If you mean the barbecue, then yes, I did.”

“Stub mentioned it to me this morning when he stopped in. You should feel privileged, that man doesn’t like too many people, especially outsiders, even though he’s only lived here for five years.”

“Oh, is that what I am?
An outsider?
Well, you must feel ashamed, sitting at the same table with me,” Lance teased.

Mary smiled as she set her beer down. “A little, but I’ll survive.” Her face sobered before she continued. “I’m glad you’ve taken a liking to John too. God knows he needs a little happiness in his life.”

Lance gave a sympathetic nod, realizing that all of the small-town stereotypes about gossip were completely true. As he watched Mary run her finger around the rim of her beer glass, he noticed a form at another table beyond theirs lean out from behind a rock pillar. When Lance looked over Mary’s shoulder, the figure had shifted out of sight.

“So I have to ask, what is the book that you’re writing about?” Mary
said,
her eyes mischievous in the candlelight.

“Oh, now you want me to divulge all the details of my next book after the jokes you’ve made at my expense?” Lance said. “Hmm, I don’t know if you can be trusted.” He leaned back in his chair, pretending to appraise her. Mary batted her eyes playfully, and although she was kidding, he still felt a faint fluttering within his chest.

Lance sipped his wine once more before relenting. “It’s about a man who vacations to a small town with his family and is run off the road one night by a car swerving into their lane. His wife and daughter are killed in the crash, and the man who ran them off the road drops a bottle of liquor into the car, making it look like the father was the one drinking. It turns out that the real culprit is the mayor of the town. When the father figures out
who
he is, he kidnaps him and keeps him in his basement. He tortures the mayor every day, and is actually planning to kill him eventually, but the mayor’s brother is the town cop, and he’s on to the father. The father isn’t really evil, but he’s battling with himself and his loss and the hatred he has for the man who robbed him of his family, his future.” Lance took a breath and shook his head as he looked out across the flat blue of the lake. “Sorry, I get caught up sometimes …” he trailed off.

“No, it sounds great. How far are you?”

“About two-thirds, maybe?”

“How’s it going to end?” Mary asked, her wide green eyes flashing in the last light of the day as it slanted through the restaurant.

Lance felt the familiar effort of trying to dredge up the conclusion of the story that he underwent whenever he ventured from the house. He could remember what he had written so far, but the rest remained clouded and would stay that way until he stepped back through the threshold. The phenomenon hadn’t lessened in the weeks since his permanent arrival. If anything, it had gained strength, shutting off his creativity faster whenever he departed.

“I’m not really sure yet,” he finally managed. He noticed the man at the table behind the rock pillar leaning out again, seemingly to eavesdrop or stare at them. When Lance looked, he just saw a shoulder receding out of sight. He frowned, wondering which resident of the small town couldn’t resist learning
whom
the local bookstore owner was on a date with.

“You kept calling him a father. Why?” Mary said.

Lance shifted his attention back to her and frowned. “What?”

“You kept referring to the main character as the father, not the husband or anything else. Why is he the father to you?”

Lance regarded her for a moment. She stared at him, unwavering,
a
sublime smile playing at the corners of her lips, which could become something beautiful or heart-achingly cold and impassive. In that tick of the clock’s hand, Lance felt himself slip. Something inside him
shifted
, an immense wall mortared with layers of doubt, fear, and guilt shuddered. He had always imagined he would be the one to chip away at the edifice of stone within him, and perhaps someday be able to carve out a door for someone else to pass through and join him on the other side. He never guessed another person would be able to disturb the foundations of the wall, but the woman across from him at that moment, in a flash of insight deeper than she knew, had done just that.

Lance gazed across the table and steadied himself before he spoke. “I guess it’s because I’ve never really known one, not a good one. And that’s something I’ve always admired.”

Mary nodded and the smile on her lips became whole. Lance noticed the waitress weaving her way through the tables from the other side of the room, and at the same time he saw the man at the next table lean out again to gawk at them.
That’s enough,
Lance thought, his anger flaring white-hot. He didn’t care who it turned out to be at the table behind Mary; if he was still ogling them when Lance looked, he would give the guy a piece of his mind. Lance swung his head around and glared at the man leaning out from behind the pillar.

His father’s face leered back at him.

Lance’s heart rolled across his ribs. The blue eyes he’d last seen wide in panic and fear stared back at him. The blond hair like straw in the low light, the mouth just a line drawn tight across the lower part of the face, one end twisted in a sneer. And then it was gone, sliding behind the rock partition that separated the tables.

“What?” Mary asked, noticing Lance’s expression. He hardly heard her, all the sound in the world became muffled—his chair falling and cracking hard on the floor behind him, his footsteps clicking on the wood below his feet, Mary’s question again.

The pillar loomed before him. He could see his father’s shoulder hunched forward over the table. The rest of the body came into view.
A white head of hair, a large nose, two hands holding a fork and knife over a piece of steak.

The elderly couple at the table looked up as Lance stepped close and shifted the wild sockets of his eyes between them.

“Can I help you?” the man said, his brow furrowed.

Lance looked at him, words of apology hanging on the back of his tongue. He turned his head toward the woman at the table—a grandmother most likely, her matching white hair tied tight into a bun and her lips pinched together.

Lance opened his mouth but shut it again. He looked past the elderly couple. He could see shadows beneath several tables and other pillars. He started to walk toward them, to find where his father hid, but hands grasped his forearm and he spun toward them, sure he would see Anthony’s smile there. Instead, Mary held his arm, a questioning look on her face, her delicate eyebrows knitted together. Lance shook himself and looked back at the table beside him.

“I’m … I’m sorry. I …” He turned away from the couple and let Mary lead him back to their table, where the waitress had righted his overturned chair and waited, wringing her hands on a small towel.

“We’re fine, just
give
us a few minutes,” Mary said, guiding Lance back into his seat. He sat there, feeling waves of shock roll over him and welcoming their distraction, as Mary sat down across from him.

“What the hell was that?” she asked, leaning over the table.

The words registered and he brought his unsteady gaze up to meet hers. He couldn’t help but glance over her shoulder at the pillar and then sweep the room in general. When nothing leapt out at him from the rest of the restaurant, he felt reality begin to weigh on his shoulders like a lead cape. The image of what he must’ve looked like a few minutes earlier ran through his head. He breathed deeply and felt the urge to weep flow over him before he swallowed it down and looked at Mary.

“I thought I saw my father,” he said.

Mary leaned back in her seat, confusion taking the place of indignation. “Why? Is he here visiting? Were you expecting him?”

Lance breathed out an effort at dark laughter and shook his head as he looked at the floor between his feet. When he raised his eyes to her face again, he felt the first trembles of anxiety prodding at his mind, but when he spoke, he only heard his voice waver once.

“No. I watched him die twenty-two years ago.”

A rock stairway dropped down from the restaurant and zigzagged across the face of the hill like an uneven scar. Mary led him down the switchbacks until they walked along the stone-studded beach. With a little urging, Lance began to speak and the trickle of words that Mary coaxed from him became a torrent that he couldn’t stop. As each sentence spilled out, more hideous than the last, he fully expected Mary to stop and walk back in the direction from which they came. He wouldn’t have stopped her. But instead, she kept pace with him, her head down, never looking at him but never looking away. Her gaze remained on the rock-covered shore at their feet, the lapping of the waves the only sound competing with his voice.

He laid his childhood out before her, a massive chunk of pain and suffering, almost acidic at times as he spoke. When he finally fell silent, they stopped walking without agreeing to. A jutting ledge of basalt created a natural bench, and they sat, staring out at the deepening purple the lake had become. A layer of clouds blanketed the evening sky, hastening the darkness that longed to converge on their corner of the world.

For a long time Mary said nothing, her eyes remaining fixed on the fading horizon. Lance stole furtive looks at her every so often, his eyes searching for a sign of regret, or even panic, on her smooth face. He had just begun to think that his early life had stunned her speechless when her voice broke his musings.

“I’m sorry,” she said. She looked over at him, and still, even in the dying light, her eyes shone green.

“Thank you. Thanks for not running away.”

“What made you think I’d run away?”

“I guess that’s what I’d expect of anyone.”

“I’m not anyone.”

“I’ve noticed,” he said.

She looked over at him and smiled. He met her eyes and held them, the urge to lean closer to her nearly overwhelming. Her face sobered as she looked out across the breadth of water, and her next question caught him off guard.

“What do you think happened to your mom?”

Lance frowned and looked down at the speckled beach beneath his feet. The question, so familiar to him, sounded strange coming from another’s lips.

He shrugged. “A part of me hopes my father was telling the truth, that she ran away in the night, got out of his reach where he couldn’t find her and just kept going. Maybe she thought if she couldn’t save both of us, she’d at least save herself. I always hated her a little, you know? She was my sanctuary at times, and at others she was the prison that kept me there, locked tight. I guess she was always both. I was just too young to see it.” Lance nodded to himself and felt tears cover the surface of his eyes for the second time that night.

“What’s your heart tell you?” Mary asked.

“That my father killed her,” Lance said. The words were as cold as any rock in the nearby waves, and just as heavy. The feeling had always been there, but before tonight, he had never voiced it aloud.

“So why do you think you saw your father tonight?” she asked.

Lance took his time answering. “I’m not sure. I’ve had dreams—nightmares—with him in them, but never a hallucination. God, I sound like a mental case. You must want to run away screaming at the top of your lungs.”

“Only until I find help.”

Her laughter cut the cool air with its warmth and Lance relaxed. Until then, he had been expecting a polite
brushoff
or a request to return to the restaurant so she could leave. Unless he misjudged her, she appeared calm and in no way threatened or frightened of him or his past.

They sat side by side, the night cooling and a crispness that spoke of fall settling into the air. Lance was about to suggest that they head back to the restaurant and try to salvage the remainder of their night, but Mary spoke first.

“I was the only one there when my mom died.” Lance looked at her, just an outline now against the last vestiges of iris light in the sky. “She was in the hospital by then, Dad couldn’t take care of her anymore at home. She was always so cold.
All throughout her treatment, and even after she became bedridden.
We’d pile up blankets on her and give her warm baths. I took her temperature once, and it was a hundred and one. But she still shivered under all the robes and comforters.

“The night she died, my dad and I were visiting. At first we stayed in the hospital with her, but after I started falling asleep in school, Dad insisted that we come home to sleep. Although some mornings I would wake up and my aunt would be there and Dad would come home exhausted from lying in an uncomfortable recliner next to her bed, holding her hand all night.” A line of tears ran in a vertical river down her cheek. Lance restrained himself from reaching out to wipe it away, and after a moment she wiped it with the back of her hand. “That night, Dad went down to get us some food from the cafeteria. Mom hadn’t been awake for a few days, but we decided to stay late and play
Uno
on the table near her bed. I was sitting there looking at her face—she’d aged so much in that year she looked more like a grandmother than a woman of forty. I was holding her hand and talking to her when her eyes came open and she looked at me. I reached up to get some water for her, like we’d done when she was still lucid, but she held me where I was and said, ‘It’s so warm. It’s so warm.’ Then her eyes closed and I felt her squeeze my hand one last time.”